The Defence of Poesy

Abstract

Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is the best known and most lastingly influential, yet also the most elusive and contested, work of premodern English literary criticism. Received opinion favours a forward-looking, representatively ‘Renaissance’ or ‘early modern’ Defence, in which a ‘humanist’ Sidney deals a decisive blow to the ‘puritan’ attack on the literary imagination. By contrast, this chapter argues that such readings suppress or misconstrue some of the essay’s key positions and sever it from important segments of its wider intellectual and cultural context. Aimed primarily at the student and the non-specialist, the chapter attempts to provide them with an overview of the work’s critical tradition and a balanced appraisal of Sidney’s often insightful but also deeply conflicted argument, exemplary of the extraordinary ferment as well as the ultimate limitations of European and English literary thought at this important juncture in its history.