Sidney's Defence

I located a nice copy of Sir Philip Sidney's A Defence of Poetry (1595) at a used bookstore this week; it's the Oxford University paperback edited by J.A. Van Dorsten.

I hadn't read the long essay/short book in ages, and I'd forgotten how pleasurable it is. Yes, the language is a bit ornate, as over 400 years of language-change stand between us and Sir Philip. And the structure of the argument is based on a classical model of rhetoric: exordium, narration, proposition, divisions [types of poetry], refutation [of charges against poetry], digression, and peroration.

Phil, as I like to call him, argues that poetry "precedes all other learning." He looks at different cultures and asks, rhetorically, what came first (in terms of what we might call "texts")? Answer: Poems! He then discusses the poet as prophet and the poet as "maker"--as artist. That is, the poet (at his or her best) says important things with words and makes beautiful, represented things out of words. He goes on to talk about divine poetry and philosophical poetry and "poetry strictly speaking," or the real stuff, which he associates with 8 specific kinds of poetry, such as the lyric, the ode, and the epic, among others. We might call them sub-genres nowadays.

Perhaps my favorite section is where he places poetry between philosophy and history. Like historical texts, poetry concerns itself with particulars, but like philosophy, it also concerns itself--indirectly, at least--with precepts, values, and ways of looking at things & people.

Poets are not liars, he claims--at least not in their roles as poets, even if (this is my example) they might cheat at cards. Poems represent nature, but they don't misrepresent things the way a deliberate lie does. Phil says poor Plato was simply misguided when he booted poets out of his utopia. He also denies that poems are "sinful fancies"; they're not icons that people worship, only artifacts (artifices?) that people enjoy and from which people gain learning. Poetry is not a bad habit.

Nowadays, poetry is alive and well, in many venues and variations. But it's difficult--for me, at least--to claim that it is central to the culture. That's partly why Phil's Defence (yes, with the British spelling) is so pleasurable and refreshing. Sir Phil clearly and boldly articulates the centrality of poetry. To him, it's "the best." I agree with him. What a surprise! The peroration--or "knock-out punch"--is hilarious. It's composed of one long sentence stretching over a page and riveted together with semi-colons, and it's a great riff. Phil had a little bit of Chris Rock and Lewis Black in him. It's a rant!

Against whom was he defending poetry? Some elements of the Church, probably. Some Neo-Platonists, probably--who favored philosophy over poetry. Some who thought poetry was merely decorative, or recreational, or precious. And probably an imagined rhetorical audience of anyone past, present, or future with bad things to say about his friend, Poetry, which he also calls Poesy sometimes. He also insists that the English language is perfectly suited to poetry--a claim that may strike modern readers as simply Anglo-centric but that may have been a parry of the thrust implying that either classical poetry (Greek, Latin) or Continental poetry (French, Spanish) was the real stuff.

It really is a great read for poets and for readers of poetry, IF you can take just a moment and get accustomed to his Renaissance vocabulary and style. It's composed of about 75 pages of very readable, nicely paced prose by a smart guy with a lively mind.