A Summary and Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney

A Summary and Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, also known as The Defence of Poesy, was written
in 1579-80). It has at least one great claim to fame: it’s the first work of ‘literary criticism’ in
English. Sidney’s essay is an ‘apology’ for, or defence of, the art of poetry, but Sidney was
inspired to write it for a very specific reason. Let’s take a closer look at this landmark defence of
poetry from a true Renaissance man.
An Apology for Poetry: summary
Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry is, in part, a response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse.
Gosson was a Puritan, and his School of Abuse was a polemical pamphlet claiming that poets
lead people astray and preach immorality. Given Sidney’s own fondness for poetry – he would
go on to write one of the first (though not quite the first) substantial sonnet sequence in the
English language – it’s unsurprising that the author of Astrophil and Stella would leap to the
defence of poetry.
Gosson even dedicated his pamphlet to Sidney without Sidney’s permission, which is one sure-
fire way to provoke a strong response from someone.
An Apology for Poetry is about the role of the poet in society. Sidney takes pains to demonstrate
that all the great civilizations of the world have valued poetry and the work of the poet. For
Sidney, poetry is not merely part of civilisation: it is civilisation. Poetry is a civilised, and
civilising, art form.
Sidney goes on to explain why this is. Poetry can bring you closer to God. It can ‘give right
honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him
beyond and over all the works of that second nature; which in nothing he showeth so much as in
poetry’. If God is our ‘Maker’, the poet is a kind of maker, too (and, indeed, the word ‘poet’ has
its roots in the ancient Greek meaning ‘to make’).
For Sidney, poetry ‘is an art of imitation’: as he points out, Aristotle (in his Poetics, the very first
work of literary criticism in all of Western literature) said as much. Poetry involves metaphor,
and metaphor is a form of imitation, comparing one thing to another. Poetry is, then, ‘a speaking
picture’ whose aim is ‘to teach and delight’.
And ‘teach’ is an important word for Sidney, for he acknowledges – indeed, insists – that poetry
should have a didactic element. It should inspire noble and moral behaviour in the reader. In a
famous quotation, Sidney asserts:
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so
pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-
much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
In other words, poetry is superior to nature or reality in that poets always overlay the world with
gold, depicting it in an idealistic way, and so present it in a ‘better’ light.
But Sidney is also aware that a reader is more likely to listen to a moral lesson if the poetry
delivering that lesson is actually entertaining. And here the poet has the advantage over the
philosopher: ‘I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only
can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught.’ But poets, by
contrast, can reach people who aren’t schooled in philosophy, and impart valuable lessons to
them.
For this reason, poetry is a democratic art, accessible to those who are untutored in philosophy.
And poetic drama is perhaps the most democratic of all. Poetry requires a reader, and a reader
needs to have been taught to read, so those who are illiterate are still shut out from it. But drama
bypasses the need for the audience to be literate. All that drama requires is a spectator, rather
than a reader.
An Apology for Poetry: analysis
Sidney is writing before the great golden age of the Elizabethan theatre (Thomas Kyd,
Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson), but theatre was a growing art form in London
at this time. And before that, communities up and down England had been entertained during
religious festivals by the Miracle and Mystery Plays, which dramatised – usually in verse –
events from the Bible, such as the Nativity and the Crucifixion.
As well as arguing that poetry is superior to philosophy, Sidney also shows that it is a superior
didactic tool to history. The problem with history is that has to stick to what actually happened.
And moral lessons aren’t always easy to derive from history, especially when evil triumphs over
good. What kind of moral message does that send out? But in poetry, Sidney argues, evil doesn’t
triumph: good always overcomes it.
But there’s more to it than this. Indeed, Sidney uncovers a startling paradox about the difference
between poetry and history. Whereas poets and playwrights never lie – yes, you read that right –
historians, conversely, do lie all the time. How can that be?
Sidney explains this by saying that for writers of fictions – such as poets and playwrights – it’s
actually impossible to lie, because they never affirm that anything they say is true. They are
presenting their writing as fiction, so they’re not pretending to deal in facts. If you offer a story
to readers and imply, ‘I made this all up’, although what follows is a fiction – essentially, one
long lie – you as a poet are not lying, because by couching your narrative as a work of fiction,
you are admitting that what you offer up is untrue.
But the historian, by contrast, purports to present the reader with facts, so as soon as they play
fast and loose with those facts, or smooth over certain details, or cast things in a favourable or
unfavourable light depending upon their own biases, they run the risk of lying. Because
historians – unlike poets – affirm things, they lie as soon as they offer something which is
packaged as ‘fact’ but is not factually true.
This rhetorical masterstroke is one of the most famous and influential parts of Sidney’s An
Apology for Poetry. It’s a counterblast to not only Gosson’s assertion that the poet is the ‘mother
of lies’, but to Plato’s older objection to the poet (in his The Republic, arguably the first work of
utopian literature ever written) on the grounds that poets are untrustworthy, because they make
things up.
On the contrary, as we’ve seen, Sidney believes the poet is valuable precisely because he makes
things up and only makes things up. And poetry, through its world of fancy and idealism, can
impart valuable lessons to people. Even comedy, often considered a lower art form than tragedy,
imitates the common errors of life, so fits with Aristotle’s idea of poetry as mimesis or imitation.
Comedy, Sidney maintains, leads people towards virtue by representing human error and folly as
absurd and worthy of scorn.
Sidney also addresses the role of the English language, arguing that it is a worthy vehicle for
poetry. As the language of the people (it had even been the official language of the English court
since the early fifteenth century), English is perfect for such a democratic art as poetry – a form
that, after all, Sidney believes should both delight and instruct its readers and spectators.

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A Summary and Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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