An Apology for Poetry Themes

In response to the disregard for poetry shared by many Elizabethan intellectuals, Sir Philip Sidney insists in “An Apology for Poetry” that the poet and his or her craft should be taken even more seriously than the supposedly more respectable fields of philosophy and history. In “An Apology for Poetry,” Sidney mounts a courtroom-style case (i.e., an apologia) for imaginative writing, following a traditional structure according to which, after an introduction, he articulates the…

As part of the case he makes in “An Apology for Poetry,” Sir Philip Sidney provides a theory of what poetry is and how it works. This includes a taxonomy of poetic genres, both ancient and modern. Sidney’s influential formulation begins with Aristotle’s traditional definition of poetry (and imaginative literature more broadly) as the imitation or mimesis of reality, but goes even further to suggest that poetry is the creation of new, more perfect realities…

Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” was written around 1580 and published in 1595, some nine years after Sidney’s death. Sidney therefore wrote one of the most important treatises on poetry in English before many of England’s greatest Elizabethan poets came on the scene. He writes of Chaucer, Gower, and his contemporary Spenser, but never would read Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and the other great poets of the day. It is perhaps not entirely surprising…