When Sir Philip Sidney produced his Defense of Poesy, England was living through a period of uncertainty and a powerful need to reaffirm its national identity, particularly in the midst of the instability that followed the Reformation and the establishment of the Church of England. In this context, poetry was viewed as ‘a seductive distraction from the religious education of the Christian reader’ (Maslen 20), especially due to the notion that it ‘offered a dangerously enticing alternative to the Scriptures’ (Maslen 19). It is not surprising then that his text intended to show how ‘reading literature helps readers to know and practise virtue in their public and private lives’ (Grogan 15), and therefore, something just and needed by society.
A close reading of Sidney’s Defense of Poesy reveals the intention of demonstrating that literature is not a distraction from intellectual judgment, but rather a path that enhances reason and facilitates a deeper understanding of truth. We first see this as Sidney draws a link between the art of teaching and the poet: ‘it is not rhyming and versing (…), but it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by’ (Sidney 15-6). The use of the word ‘delightful’highlights the relationship between the acquisition of knowledge and beauty: it turns the process of learning into an experience that can be enjoyed by the senses.
It is important to recall the true end Sidney attributes to learning, which is ‘to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by, their clay lodgings, can be capable of (Sidney 16). How is this achieved? Sidney defends that poetry is not so much a discovery but a rediscovery of the divine. For the poet aspires to make things ‘either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew’ (Sidney 13), but does so by ‘with the force of a divine breath’ (Sidney 14). Here lies Sidney’s central argument: by reminding the reader of the divine truth and by making it delightful to the senses, poetry encourages its readers to imitate the morality of the path revealed to them, that is, the path towards the perfection of the soul.
The process itself requires introspection, and it is the poet’s own learning process that is then turned into the words of his art. Poetry, in its purest form, depends on the success of the poet’s own exercise of rediscovering knowledge. If the poet were to fail in finding this divine truth within himself, the images evoked in the reader would then, not being actual knowledge, amount to deception, no matter how beautified by words. This enhances the poet’s responsibility in the public sphere, for ‘he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description’ (Sidney 18). Today, such reflection is perhaps more necessary than ever.
Julia Turner is a Mexican writer, lecturer, and researcher of fantasy literature. She teaches at Universidad Panamericana and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in English Literature: Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. She can be contacted at mturner@up.edu.mx
