An Introduction to the English Renaissance

How a cultural revival inspired an era of unprecedented poetic evolution.

BY THE EDITORS

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to
thee.” These two lines, the closing couplet of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18
(“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), make one of the boldest boasts in poetry
—about poetry. Centuries after the 1609 publication of the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s
boast has never been proven wrong. As long as people have breathed (and spoken),
seen (and read) poetry, they have returned to Shakespeare’s words and countless other
poems from Shakespeare’s period in literary history. The English Renaissance, an era
of cultural revival and poetic evolution starting in the late 15th century and spilling
into the revolutionary years of the 17th century, stands as an early summit of poetry
achievement, the era in which the modern sense of English poetry begins. The era’s
influence—its enduring traditions, inspiring experiments, and seemingly
unsurpassable highs—reverberates today.
The English Renaissance can be hard to date precisely, but for most scholars, it begins
with the rise of the Tudor Dynasty (1485–1603) and reaches its cultural summit
during the 45-year reign of the final Tudor monarch, the charismatic Elizabeth I
(1558–1603). The period extends into the reigns of the Stuarts, King James I (1603–
25) and perhaps that of Charles I (1625–49). The era seethed with incessant political
tensions and—never separable from politics—religious rifts between Catholics and
Protestants, especially the so-called Puritan sects that fought to reform the Church of
England by removing any Catholic or “popish” practices. The Renaissance firmly
ends once those tensions boil over into a distinctly different period of revolutionary
change and a succession of nation-shaking events: the series of civil wars between
Parliamentarians and Royalists, the execution of Charles I, the interregnum of
republican-led governments, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

A period lasting only a century or two but encompassing momentous change, the
English Renaissance drastically shaped what being English meant, at home and
abroad. As literacy increased and printing accelerated, the English language rose to a
place of international prestige, and a distinctly English literature began to be braided
from diverse cultural strands: Middle English poetry and medieval mystery plays;
ballads, hymns, and popular songs; translations from classical literatures and
contemporary literature from the Continent. As a nation and a fledgling empire,
England emerged as an indomitable economic and military force, sending explorers,
merchants, and colonists as far as Africa, Asia, and the so-called New World. At the
epicenter of England’s explosive rise was the rapidly growing city of London, soon to
become the largest city in Europe (and eventually the world). With its surging
population, flourishing markets and ports, and thriving public theaters, London
offered all the excitements of a modern metropolis—as well as all the dangers. The
threat of bubonic plague loomed constantly over all of Europe, posing immense risks
to a city as densely congested as London, where, every few years, a rampant outbreak
forced theaters to close down for months at a time.

The term Renaissance, deriving from the French for “rebirth,” is a name retroactively
bestowed by 19th-century thinkers, who distinguished the era by its revivals: a
renewed interest in ancient languages, the recovery of antique manuscripts, and the
return to the classical ideals underlying the era’s defining intellectual movement,
Renaissance humanism. Greek and Roman models, renovated for modern purposes,
were especially crucial for poets defining or defending their art. In the era’s pinnacle
of literary criticism, The Defence of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney borrowed his chief
terms and questions from Greek philosophers born nearly two millennia earlier.
“Poesy,” he proposes, “is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the
word mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to
speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight.”
Against the charge, leveled in Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE), that all this poetic
“counterfeiting” amounted to lying, Sidney mounted an entirely novel defense that
flaunted a modern embrace of artifice and head-spinning fantasy. Poets couldn’t lie,
because their allegorical and figurative inventions never pretended to be real or true—
or so Sidney contended in an ingenious argumentative maneuver: “the poet, he
nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”
Today we remember Sidney as an indisputably great poet and scholar of his time. To
his contemporaries, however, he was far from a writer first: he was a nobleman, a
courtier, a patron, a horseman, a paragon of knightly valor who died from battle
injuries at age 31. All Renaissance poets were amateurs relative to the modern
understanding of professional, career writers. Until late in the period, there was no
system of royalties to reward publishing poetry, no author-owned copyright or
freedom of the press to protect it, and only a small (if growing) literate audience to
read it. (The first poet to collect his own work for publication was Ben Jonson, in
1616; the first to earn royalties was John Milton, who negotiated for earnings from the
first edition of Paradise Lost in 1667.)
With little way to live solely on their publications, poets who needed work made their
livings as playwrights, translators, essayists, scholars, secretaries, ambassadors,
soldiers, politicians, physicians, composers, and clergymen—all occupations that took
valuable time away from writing poetry. Poets of all classes found support and shelter
—or simply an audience—in a handful of institutions. For Thomas Wyatt, Henry
Howard, Sidney, and Walter Raleigh, the center of poetry was the royal court. There,
noblemen and noblewomen, public servants, and charming socialites alike practiced
poetry as an exquisite pastime, an imaginative competition that transformed the social
arts of persuasion, diplomacy, and self-making into displays of rhetorical dexterity
and verbal play. Writers of lower status, gravitating to the court hoping to acquire the
financial support of a patron, offered prestige, dedications, and commissioned works
in exchange for favors, employment, or steady salaries. Another institution was the
church: several of the era’s best poets—such as John Donne and George Herbert—
were clergymen, and many others found their calling writing devotional poetry and
adapting scripture, psalms, and prayers into vernacular English. Still other poets found
a home in London's first permanent public theaters, built in the late 16th
century. Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson conducted their
audacious artistic experiments on stage in public entertainments of an
unprecedentedly wide appeal. All these institutions posed immense barriers to women,
even the most supremely educated and advantaged. Many of the period’s best-
remembered women poets—Æemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, and Margaret Cavendish
—came to prominence only in the 17th century.
The poetry springing from these competing centers was prismatically diverse. Just like
our contemporary moment, it was volatilely susceptible to fashions and trends: first
sonnet sequences and epyllions (or short epics) were all the rage, then odes and
satires, then dramatic monologues and country-house poems. In his Defence, Sidney
lists major poetic “kinds” that readers then and now can still
recognize: pastoral, elegiac, satiric, comic, tragic, lyric, heroic. But there is no one
Renaissance style. If some poets dazzle readers with fluent sonic patterns, delightful
ornaments, or one startling metaphor after the next, others adopt a plain style,
achieving their judicious effects by withholding any rhetorical pyrotechnics—or by
deftly hiding their rhetoric under unassuming surfaces.
The shapes and sizes of a Renaissance poem ran the gamut from Ben Jonson’s
prickly, no-word-wasted epigrams (“On Gut”: “Gut eats all day and lechers all the
night; / So all his meat he tasteth over twice”) to Edmund Spenser’s gargantuan
epic The  Faerie  Queene (1590, 1596); by his death, Spenser had completed six of a
proposed 24 books and had still already produced one of the longest poems in the
language. Far from a period of formal limitation or strictly codified rules, the
Renaissance prized irreverent variation and brash gamesmanship. Even blank verse, or
unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is quite possibly the most frequently appearing
form in all of English poetry, was the result of a one-off experiment, a translation
of Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 1540) by the young Earl of Surrey. A mainstay of English
poetry and verse drama ever since, blank verse was, at the time of its invention, a
quietly revolutionary easing of restrictions. Removing the necessities of rhyme or
strict stanza length, blank verse allowed poets and playwrights to narrate, meditate,
and soliloquize at any length through capacious five-stress lines that (it was believed)
approximated the duration of a single breath.
Perhaps the most recognizable form in Renaissance poetry was the sonnet, an
intricately rhymed, 14-line poem derived from the Italian sonetto (“little song”) and
perfected by the 14th-century poet Petrarch. The first English sonnets were Petrarchan
translations and imitations by Wyatt and Surrey, who inaugurated an English tradition
of love poems featuring idealized but frustratingly distant beloveds and speakers
working through their dizzyingly mixed feelings in impassioned, hyperbolic, and
often oxymoronic language: “I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice,” writes Wyatt
in his translation of Petrarch’s Rima 134. “I love another, and thus I hate myself.”
Love may be the central subject of sonnets and Renaissance poetry generally, but it
comes in a color wheel of varieties: transient and transcendental, holy and forbidden,
lustful and flirtatious and platonic, heterosexual and what we today call queer. Later
poets stretched the sonnet’s traditionally taut bounds to encompass less traditional
feelings: devotional piety in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, female desire
in Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, political furor in John Milton’s “On the Late
Massacre at Piedmont.”
When does Renaissance poetry end? It’s difficult to say precisely, in part because the
lives of poets and their stellar achievements don’t neatly conform to the era’s political
and social milestones. By Elizabeth’s death, many of the greatest Elizabethan
poets were writing at or near their peak, and the century’s best-known schools of
poets were already coalescing. Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew
Marvell, and others became known as the Metaphysical poets, after the unfavorable
nickname given by the 18th-century poet-critic Samuel Johnson. What Johnson
disliked about the Metaphysical poets was precisely what modernists such as T.S.
Eliot so admired: a blend of braininess and heart, willfully unmusical speech rhythms,
and the outlandish, extravagantly developed metaphors that Johnson
called conceits, in which “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
together.” (Consider Donne’s comparison, in “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning,” of two lovers’ souls to the “stiff twin” legs of a geometer’s compass, one
moving, the other fixed, the two inextricably connected.) A later, contrasting school
was the Cavalier poets, including Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, and Richard
Lovelace. All were Royalists, loyal to the king during the civil wars, and most were
courtiers or otherwise linked to England’s ruling classes. Harmonizing classical
moderation and cosmopolitan wit in measured verses, the Cavalier poets traced their
gallant art to the urbane poet-playwright Ben Jonson; some even labeled themselves
“Sons of Ben.” As the English Renaissance closes, its many threads—religious and
secular, classical and topical—entwine in the virtuosic early poems of John Milton,
whose synthesizing mind produced Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), the
Christian epic towering over English-language poetry for centuries to follow.
The following poets, poem guides, articles, and recordings traverse almost two
centuries of poetry, from Wyatt to Milton, and the Renaissance era that readers and
poets have long prized as a golden age of poetic achievement in English. This
introduction offers one sketch of that period’s ceaseless innovations and tremendous
expansions.
Sir Thomas Wyatt
1503–1542

No poet represents the complexities of the British court of Henry VIII better than Sir
Thomas Wyatt. Skilled in international diplomacy, imprisoned without charges, at
ease jousting in tournaments, and adept at writing courtly poetry, Wyatt was admired
and envied by his contemporaries. The distinction between his public and private life
was not always clearly marked, for he spent his life at various courts, where he wrote
for a predominantly aristocratic audience who shared common interests. Through and
in this milieu he created a new English poetics by experimenting with meter and voice
and by grafting Continental and classical forms and ideas to English traditions. Wyatt
wrote the first English sonnets and true satires, projecting through them the most
important political issues of the period: the Protestant Reformation and the
centralization of state power under the reigns of the Tudors. For this combination of
formalistic innovation and historical reflection, he is today considered the most
important poet of the first half of the sixteenth century.

Born around 1503 at Allington Castle in Kent, England, Wyatt was the son of Sir
Henry Wyatt of Yorkshire and Anne Skinner Wyatt of Surrey. Imprisoned more than
once by Richard III, Sir Henry had become under Henry VII a powerful, wealthy
privy councillor, and he remained so after Henry VIII’s accession. John Leland writes
that Wyatt attended Cambridge, and although there is no record to confirm the
statement, it seems plausible that he did. It is often assumed that in 1516 he entered
Saint John’s College, Cambridge, but his name may have been confused with another
Wyatt matriculating there. After marriage to Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Thomas,
Lord Cobham, in 1520 and the birth of a son in 1521, Wyatt progressed in his career
at court, as esquire of the king’s body and clerk of the king’s jewels (1524). He
probably acquired these posts through a combination of innate abilities and his
father’s influence. Stephen Miriam Foley suggests in Sir Thomas Wyatt (1990) that
the positions were more significant than their titles might imply, for they helped to
entrench him in the king’s household. Members of that household sought power,
struggling with the king’s councillors to influence the king.
Sometime after the birth of his son, perhaps around 1525, Wyatt seems to have
become estranged from his wife; all editors and biographers assume the reason to be
her infidelity, for such were the rumors during his life. The Spanish Calendar, for
instance, gives this detail: “Wyatt had cast [his wife] away on account of adultery.” It
is certain that in 1526, when Sir Thomas Cheney embarked for the French court on an
official delegation, Wyatt accompanied him.
Around 1527 Queen Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII, asked Wyatt to
translate Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae. Wyatt translated in its place a
piece he found less tedious, Guillaume Budé’s Latin version of Plutarch’s De
tranquillitate et securitate animi. It was soon published by Richard Pynson as The
Quiet of Mind (1528), and as several scholars have pointed out, the echoes of “quiet
mind” in Wyatt’s poetry indicate that the piece continued to hold philosophical
importance for him. From around 1528 or 1529 to November 1530, Wyatt held the
post of high marshal of Calais, and in 1532 he became commissioner of the peace in
Essex. Around 1536 Wyatt formed an attachment to Elizabeth Darrell, who became
his mistress for life. Some of his poems, such as “A face that should content me
wondrous well” and “So feeble is the thread,” almost surely allude to this relationship.
The woman with whom Wyatt has been notoriously associated, however, is Anne
Boleyn, second queen of Henry VIII. Careful scholars acknowledge that although
Wyatt’s poetry is suggestive, the hard evidence for his role as Boleyn’s lover, or
scorned lover, is so bedeviled by legend and rumor as to affect even the most cautious
statements. One poem long considered to allude to Boleyn is the riddle “What word is
that that changeth not” (no. 54), for its solution (anna) is penned above the poem in
the Egerton manuscript (though not in Wyatt’s or the scribe’s hand and, it seems, after
the poem was copied there.) The third line of the poem puns on the solution: “It is
mine answer” (mine Anne, sir). There is nothing, however, to indicate that the poem is
about any specific Anne. Although anecdotes have circulated of the rivalry between
Wyatt and Henry, it is very difficult and perhaps even impossible to gauge the extent
of Wyatt’s relationship with Boleyn, especially when Henry decided to divorce
Catherine and marry her. Henry’s doing so resulted in the Act of Supremacy (1534),
whereby he broke from the hegemony of the pope and the Catholic church and
proclaimed himself head of the church in England. This move had severe domestic
and international consequences, and in 1536 Wyatt was arrested a few days after the
arrests of Anne and five men alleged to have been her lovers.
Wyatt was soon restored to favor, though, made sheriff of Kent, and asked to muster
men and to attend on Henry VIII. In November 1536 his father died, and in 1537 he
once again undertook a diplomatic mission, this time as ambassador to the court of
Emperor Charles V. On his journey Wyatt wrote to his son, advising him to emulate
the exemplary life of Sir Henry Wyatt rather than Wyatt’s own: “And of myself I may
be a near example unto you of my folly and unthriftness that hath as I well deserved
brought me into a thousand dangers and hazards, enmities, hatreds, prisonments,
despites, and indignations.” He further admonished his son to “make God and
goodness” his “foundations.” An epigram in Wyatt’s hand in the Egerton manuscript,
“Of Carthage he, that worthy warrior,” ends with a reference to Spain: “At Monzòn
thus I restless rest in Spain” (no. 46). Henry VIII wished to prevent Charles V from
forming what would amount to a Catholic alliance with Francis I and thus to prevent a
concerted attack on England. Wyatt returned home in mid 1538; but when Charles and
Francis, without Henry, reached a separate accord at Nice, the danger of an attack
against England grew more grave. Wyatt’s poem in ottava rima, “Tagus, farewell”
(no. 60), probably dates from this period. With this poem, as with the letter to his son,
scholars have tried to establish Wyatt’s character. Despite his sufferings and despite
his criticisms of the king and his court, he was a loyal servant to Henry VIII. In the
last lines the speaker looks forward to returning to London: “My king, my country,
alone for whom I live, / Of mighty love the wings for this me give.”

Once more ambassador to the emperor in 1539, Wyatt was to watch his movements
through France and to ascertain his intentions regarding England. But by mid 1540,
after Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves threatened to create a Protestant
league, and in the event of growing distrust between Charles and Francis, the danger
of an attack against England was no longer imminent, so Wyatt returned home. On 28
July his patron, Cromwell, was executed. Historians attribute Cromwell’s fall in part
to factional resistance to his foreign and religious policies and in part to Henry’s
severe dislike of Anne of Cleves. He had married her sight unseen and claimed that
descriptions of her beauty were untrue (historian John Guy notes that he called her
“the Flanders mare”). An account found in the Spanish chronicle claims that at the
execution Cromwell asked Wyatt to pray for him but that Wyatt was so overcome by
tears he could not speak. Cromwell’s papers were investigated after his execution, and
in 1541 Wyatt was arrested and imprisoned on the weight of old allegations that he
had met with the traitor Reginald Pole and had otherwise misrepresented the king’s
interests. Wyatt had been cleared of those charges in 1538, but Cromwell’s death left
him open to further attack from his court enemies.

A poem addressed to Sir Francis Brian (no. 62) has traditionally been dated to this last
period of incarceration:

     Sighs are my food, drink are my tears;

     Clinking of fetters such music would crave.
     Stink and close air away my life wears.
     Innocency is all the hope I have.
 
Besides its graphic depiction of the speaker’s suffering and humiliation—“this wound
shall heal again / But yet, alas, the scar shall still remain”—this poem echoes “Who
list his wealth and ease retain” in its claim of the speaker’s innocence. Wyatt had in
1536 suffered imprisonment in the Tower and, if scholarly dating is correct, had
written of it. “Sighs are my food,” though shorter, is more bitter in tone than the
earlier poem. When commanded to answer in writing the accusations against him,
Wyatt provided a declaration of his innocence. He insisted that “for my part I declare
affirmingly, at all proofs whereby a Christian man may be tried, that in my life in
crime toward the Majesty of the King my master or any his issue, in deed, word,
writing or wish I never offended, I never committed malice or offense, or (as I have
presently said before you) done thing wherein my thought could accuse my
conscience.” He then prepared a lengthy, sharply worded defense of his actions,
turning the case against his accusers. At its end he declares: “Thus much I thought to
say unto you afore both God and man to discharge me, that I seem not to perish in my
own fault, for lack of declaring my truth; and afore God and all these men I charge
you with my innocent truth that in case, as God defend, you be guilty of mine
innocent blood, that you before his tribunal shall be inexcusable.” No evidence of a
trial survives; but the Privy Council later mentioned Wyatt’s confession and pardon,
both of which may have been wrought from this defense. At the time, the pardon was
believed to have been urged by Queen Catherine Howard and to have rested on the
removal of Elizabeth Darrell and the reinstatement of Wyatt’s wife. In 1541 Wyatt
made his will, providing for Darrell and their son, Francis, and for his legitimate son,
Thomas. There are indications that Wyatt was restored to favor, for later in 1541 he
received some of the awards of Thomas Culpepper, who was charged with adultery
with Queen Catherine Howard, and made an advantageous exchange of property with
Henry VIII. Early in 1542 Wyatt was probably member of Parliament for Kent, and it
is possible that he was to be made vice admiral of a fleet. On 11 October 1542, on his
way to Falmouth to meet and escort to London the Spanish envoy, he died of a fever
at the home of Sir John Horsey at Sherborne in Dorset.Every aspect of Wyatt’s poetry
has been widely debated: the canon, the texts, the prosody, the occasion, the personae
or voices, the significance of French and Italian influences, and the representation of
court life. Wyatt’s poems circulated widely among various members of Henry’s court,
and some may first have been published in a miscellany or verse anthology, The
Court of Venus, of which three fragments survive. In most of his poetry Wyatt worked
both with English models, notably Geoffrey Chaucer, and Continental sources. This
combination gives his poems their peculiar characteristic of following the conventions
of amour courtois yet implicitly rejecting those conventions at the same time. His
canon falls into two subgenres: courtly poetry and religious poetry. The courtly poetry
may be divided, with some difficulty, between the love poems and the satiric poems.
The love poetry predominates and includes work in several forms, such as sonnets,
epigrams, and what have traditionally been called songs. Many of Wyatt’s Petrarchan
sources had been set to music by the early sixteenth century, but recent scholars have
doubted whether he wrote his poems for musical accompaniment.
Most scholars recognize the importance of the “courtly” context for Wyatt’s oeuvre.
According to scholar Raymond Southall, the love complaints, besides being personal
expressions of love or pain, may also be stylized verses designed to win the favor of
court ladies who could offer political advancement to a courtier. Southall notes that
many of Wyatt’s poems repeatedly stress the insecurity of a man’s fortunes, an
attitude consistent with the realities of court life. Others have suggested that love
poetry masks the pursuit of power at court, and it now seems clear that Wyatt’s
metaphors serve a double purpose. This courtly context has been filled in by
historicist scholars, who have more thoroughly explored the role-playing, submission
to authority, and engaging in intrigue required for success at Henry VIII’s court.

One of Wyatt’s greatest poetic achievements is his adaptation of the sonnet form into
English. Although he has been criticized by modern scholars for imitating the self-
conscious conceits (extended comparisons) and oxymora (oppositions such as “ice /
fire”) of his sources, such language and sentiments would have found an appreciative
audience at the time. A clear example of this type of sonnet is his translation of
Petrarch’s Rime 134, “Pace non trovo e non ho da far guerra.” Wyatt’s poem (no.
17) begins:
 

     I find no peace and all my war is done.

     I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice.
     I fly above the wind yet can I not arise.
     And naught I have and all the world I seize on.
 

Each succeeding line expresses a contradiction in the lover’s situation: he feels both
freedom and constraint; he wishes both life and death; he is both blind and seeing,
mute and complaining, loving another and hating himself, sorrowful and joyful. The
last line of this poem is typical of Wyatt in indicating that such internal divisions
derive from the beloved: his “delight is causer of this strife.”

By far the most widely held view is that when Wyatt’s poetry defies the beloved and
denounces the game of love, or rejects the devotion to love found in his models, it
approaches the anti-Petrarchism of the sort evident later in Elizabethan poetry. His
sonnet beginning “Was I never yet of your love grieved / Nor never shall while that
my life doth last” (no. 12), a translation of Petrarch’s Rime 82, ”Io non fu’ d’ amar
voi lassato unqu’ anco,” declares that “of hating myself that date is past” and ends
with the lines that project the speaker’s disdain:
 

     If otherwise ye seek for to fulfill

     Your disdain, ye err and shall not as ye ween,
     And ye yourself the cause thereof hath been.
 

If this frustration of the beloved’s satisfaction seems vengeful and petty, one must
remember that it is bred by a system that seems arbitrary in its delegation of power
and responsibility but is in fact closed and dependent on personal loyalties.

A sonnet often cited as an example of Wyatt’s anti-Petrarchism is one for which no

source has yet been found,”Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever” (no. 31). As the
first line indicates, the speaker has renounced love; he will replace it with the
philosophy of Seneca and Plato and adopt a more Stoic attitude toward love. He
decides to set no more store by such “trifles” and bids love “Go trouble younger
hearts.” The rejection of love as a waste of one’s time and a sure means to suffer is
complete in the couplet: “For hitherto though I have lost all my time, / Me lusteth no
longer rotten boughs to climb.” A similar theme is sounded in another poem whose
source is likewise unknown, ”There was never file half so well filed” (no. 32). Here
the speaker intends to abandon the passion or “folly” of youthful love for the “reason”
of maturity. Expressing regret for wasted time and wasted trust, the poem ends by
claiming that one who deceives should not complain of being deceived in return but
should receive the “reward” of “little trust forever.” Both these poems are more
severely critical views of the artificiality and duplicity of courtly life than the one to
be found in a translation such as “I find no peace and all my war is done”; and yet its
juxtapositions of opposites may also indicate the underlying insecurity of that life.
Some of Wyatt’s sourceless poems that are not sonnets, such as “My lute, awake” (no.
109), also convey a markedly anti-Petrarchan attitude. The several copies of this
eight-stanza song, including those in the Stark and Folger fragments of The Court of
Venus, suggest the extent of its popularity. It begins with the standard lover’s
complaint but then abandons the courtly love game and pronounces what amounts to a
curse on the beloved:
 

     Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain

     That makest but game on earnest pain.
     Think not alone under the sun
     Unquit to cause thy lovers plain
     Although my lute and I have done.
 
     May chance thee lie withered and old
     The winter nights that are so cold,
     Plaining in vain unto the moon.
     Thy wishes then dare not be told
     Care then who list for I have done.
 

It is unclear whether the poem’s bitter tone is a projection by Wyatt or by the speaker;
and although its message may be traditional, it is a stark reminder of the importance of
youth in Henry’s court. These poems have an edge to them that jars with the very
concept of courtly love poetry but that matches the tone of traditional court satire from
other sources, including earlier English poets. This rejection or theme of lost beauty is
carried to a misogynistic extreme in another of Wyatt’s better-known poems, “Ye old
mule” (no. 7). Here the faded beauty is compared to a worn-out beast of burden: she
can no longer choose her lovers but must buy what is available.

In these and later anti-Petrarchan poems in English, the lover’s pain is blamed on the
beloved’s artifice, guile, deceit, dissembling, fickleness, and hard-heartedness; in
Wyatt’s poems the lover’s constancy is repeatedly compared to the beloved’s lack of
faith. In “Thou hast no faith of him that hath none” (no. 6), the lover, rather than
begging for mercy or favor, is angered at having been betrayed:
 

     I thought thee true without exception.

     But I perceive I lacked discretion
     To fashion faith to words mutable:
     Thy thought is too light and variable.
     To change so oft without occasion,
     Thou hast no faith.

Many of Wyatt’s poems treat mutability as an undesirable characteristic for a lover, a

servant, a patron, or a king; changefulness or betrayal is his common theme. It is not
always clear, however, whether in these poems Wyatt speaks in his own voice or
creates various personae. Some of the poems project a great deal of venom over
personal and political events and seem to reveal an intelligent courtier struggling to
define himself against a political structure he both criticizes and enjoys. Some
scholars thus see Wyatt as a rebellious figure in a corrupt and corrupting system;
others see him as hopelessly caught in that system and its dynastic concerns.
 Is it Possible
BY SIR THOMAS WYATT
Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
So cruel intent,
So hasty heat and so soon spent,
From love to hate, and thence for to relent?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
To spy it in an eye
That turns as oft as chance on die,
The truth whereof can any try?
Is it possible?

It is possible
For to turn so oft,
To bring that lowest which was most aloft,
And to fall highest yet to light soft:
It is possible.

All is possible
Whoso list believe.
Trust therefore first, and after preve,
As men wed ladies by licence and leave.
All is possible.

I Find no Peace
BY SIR THOMAS WYATT
I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind

BY SIR THOMAS WYATT
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
1517–1547
Tudor poet Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was born in Hunsdon, Hertfordshire,
England. He was the son of the third Duke of Norfolk. Associated with the royal
court, he grew up at Windsor, where he was a childhood companion to the Duke of
Richmond, son of Henry VIII. Surrey was also a first cousin to Anne Boleyn.
Educated by tutors, he lived an eventful life as a soldier and a courtier, eventually
marrying Lady Frances de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford.

In 1532, he traveled to France with Henry VIII and stayed at the French court for
almost a year. He was made Knight of the Garter in 1541 and served as a soldier in
France. After Anne Boleyn’s execution, Surrey and his father ran afoul of the new
English court on several occasions. Eventually charged with treason, he was
imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed in 1547.

Surrey’s poetry is often associated with that of Thomas Wyatt, whose work was
published alongside Surrey’s in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). A major poet of the 16th
century, Surrey is credited with developing the Shakespearean form of the sonnet. He
wrote love poems and elegies and translated Books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid as well
as Psalms and Ecclesiastes from the Bible. He also introduced blank verse to English
—a form that he used in his translations of Virgil. 

"Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!"

BY HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!
   Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing;
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,
   The nightès car the stars about doth bring;
Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less:
   So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great increase
   Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,
In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.
   For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:
But by and by, the cause of my disease
   Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.   

……………………………………………………………………………

Complaint of the Absence of Her Love Being Upon the Sea

BY HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
O happy dames, that may embrace
The fruit of your delight,
Help to bewail the woeful case
And eke the heavy plight
Of me, that wonted to rejoice
The fortune of my pleasant choice;
Good ladies, help to fill my mourning voice.

In ship, freight with remembrance

Of thoughts and pleasures past,
He sails that hath in governance
My life while it will last;
With scalding sighs, for lack of gale,
Furthering his hope, that is his sail,
Toward me, the sweet port of his avail.

Alas! how oft in dreams I see

Those eyes that were my food;
Which sometime so delighted me,
That yet they do me good;
Wherewith I wake with his return,
Whose absent flame did make me burn:
But when I find the lack, Lord, how I mourn!

When other lovers in arms across

Rejoice their chief delight.
Drowned in tears, to mourn my loss
I stand the bitter night
In my window, where I may see
Before the winds how the clouds flee.
Lo! what a mariner love hath made of me!

And in green waves when the salt flood

Doth rise by rage of wind,
A thousand fancies in that mood
Assail my restless mind.
Alas! now drencheth my sweet foe,
That with the spoil of my heart did go,
And left me; but, alas! why did he so?

And when the seas wax calm again

To chase fro me annoy,
My doubtful hope doth cause me pain;
So dread cuts off my joy.
Thus is my wealth mingled with woe,
And of each thought a doubt doth grow;
“Now he comes! Will he come? Alas, no, no!”

…………………………………………………………….

The Things That Cause a Quiet Life

BY HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
(Written by Martial)

My friend, the things that do attain

The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;

No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthy life;
The household of continuance;

The mean diet, no dainty fare;

True wisdom joined with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;

The faithful wife, without debate;

Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Content thyself with thine estate,
Neither wish death, nor fear his might.

George Herbert
1593–1633

Nestled in the age of Shakespeare and Milton is the literary stalwart George Herbert,

poet and Church of England clergyman. Herbert's poetry would influence fellow poets
such as Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and then in later
centuries Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, and,
perhaps Robert Frost—although these later poets are more abstract in their devotion to
Herbert than were his 17th-century followers. Herbert’s poetry, although often
formally experimental, is always passionate, searching, and elegant.

Much of his early popularity—there were at least 11 editions of The Temple in the
17th century—no doubt owes something to the carefully crafted persona of "holy Mr.
Herbert" put forth by the custodians of his literary works and reputation. In the
preface to the first edition of The Temple, published in 1633, shortly after Herbert
died, his close friend Nicholas Ferrar established the contours of Herbert's exemplary
life story, a story that not only validated but was also presumably told in the poems of
the volume. In a few short pages Ferrar indelibly sketches Herbert as one who
exchanged the advantages of noble birth and worldly preferment for the strains of
serving at "Gods Altar," one whose "obedience and conformitie to the Church and the
discipline thereof was singularly remarkable," and whose "faithfull discharge" of the
holy duties to which he was called "make him justly a companion to the primitive
Saints, and a pattern or more for the age he lived in." This is not only high praise, but
praise with political as well as religious implications: in 1633 the church was a place
of contention as well as worship, and Ferrar helped establish Herbert as a model of
harmonious, orderly, noncontroversial devotion for whom faith brought answers and
commitment to the social establishment, not divisive questions and social
fragmentation.

By 1652, the time of the next major biographical statement about Herbert, the tensions
of the 1630s had erupted into a devastating civil war: the army of King Charles I had
been decisively defeated, and the king himself executed; the bishops had been
disenfranchised from their high place in both church and state government; and the
maintenance of peace depended on a coalition of parties —old and new landowners,
merchants, religious enthusiasts, army commanders, and soldiers—with conflicting
interests. Little wonder, then, that Barnabas Oley, a Royalist divine, envisioned
Herbert as a "primitive ... holy and heavenly soul" who could instruct a later
generation living in much-deserved chastisement and exile. Herbert seemed to be a fit
subject for nostalgia, one who lived and died in peace. In Oley's introduction
to Herbert's Remains (1652), containing among other works A Priest to the Temple:
Or, The Country Parson, Herbert's prose description of the ideal way a priest would
serve his country parish (written during the last years of his life when he was a
country parson at Bemerton), Oley pictures Herbert as one who embodies traits that
the current age has left behind: a person of charity, a lover of traditional, time-honored
worship, church music and ceremonies, and a master of "modest, grave and Christian
reproof" Oley's preface is apocalyptic throughout, and he frames Herbert's image in
such a way that it may lead midcentury England to holiness and repentance,
"Recovery, and Profit."

Izaak Walton, who wrote the first extensive biography of Herbert, follows the lead of
Ferrar and Oley in shaping Herbert's life. Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert, first
published in 1670 and then revised in 1674 and 1675, does not have Ferrar's austerity
nor Oley's urgency: by 1670 the king had been restored, the Anglican church was
reestablished as the official religious institution of the country, and—despite
inevitable exceptions—there seemed to be a growing respect for the advantages of
toleration and accommodation rather than confrontation. Herbert was still needed, but
not so much for reproof in perilous times as for gentle guidance in times of relative
calm. For Walton, Herbert was not only a "primitive Saint"—that is, a throwback to
the church of a simpler era—but a prefiguration of the ideal Restoration clergyman:
wellborn but socially responsible, educated but devout, experienced in the ways of the
world but fully committed to the ways of the church, and knowledgeable about both
the pains and joys of spiritual life.  In Walton's hands Herbert comes alive, but it is
safest to approach Walton's biography as one of the great works of 17th-century prose
fiction.

George Herbert was born on April 3, 1593 at Black Hall in Montgomery, Wales. His
family on his father's side was one of the oldest and most powerful in
Montgomeryshire, having settled there in the early 13th century and improving and
consolidating its status by shrewd marriage settlements and continuous governmental
service. The surviving stories about the patriarchs focus, not surprisingly, on their
bravery and valor as they fought to civilize the countryside, administer justice, and
keep peace in an area that had a well-deserved reputation for wildness. Herbert no
doubt grew up with these tales but could not have had much contact with the men
themselves: his grandfather, evidently a remarkable courtier, warrior, and politician,
died the month after Herbert was born; and his father, also an active local sheriff and
member of Parliament, died when Herbert was three and a half years old.His mother,
Magdalen, from the Newport family of Shropshire, was by all accounts an
extraordinary woman, fully capable of managing the complex financial affairs of the
family, moving the household when necessary, and supervising the academic and
spiritual education of her ten children. There is evidence of Herbert's deep attachment
to, and even identification with, his mother throughout his works: his earliest
surviving poems, which attempt to outline his direction as a poet, were written and
sent to her as a gift; he mourned her death (and celebrated her life) with a collection of
Latin and Greek poems, Memoriae Matris Sacrum (1627); and The Temple is filled
with images of childlike submissiveness and maternal love, devotion, and
authority. John Donne, with whom Magdalen was well acquainted, delivered her
funeral sermon.

Magdalen did not keep the family long in Wales. Shortly after the birth of her last
child, Thomas, in 1597, she moved the family first to Shropshire, then to Oxford—
primarily to oversee the education of the oldest son, Edward—and then finally to a
house at Charing Cross, London. This last move also facilitated the education of the
other children. George was tutored at home and then entered Westminster School,
probably in 1604, a distinguished grammar school that not only grounded him in the
study of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and music, but also introduced him to Lancelot
Andrewes, one of the great churchmen and preachers of the time. From Westminster,
Herbert went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609 and began one of the most
important institutional affiliations of his life, one that lasted nearly 20 years.

At Cambridge, Herbert moved smoothly through the typical stages of academic

success: he earned a BA then an MA; obtained a Minor fellowship then a Major
fellowship, which involved increasing responsibilities as a tutor and lecturer; and was
made university orator in 1620, a position of great prestige within the university that
was often a stepping-stone to a successful career at court. The orator was the
spokesperson for the university on a variety of occasions, making speeches and
writing letters, and the little evidence that survives of Herbert's activities as orator
indicates that he served in this capacity with both ceremonious wit and independent
boldness. He was well able to offer the required fatuous compliments to the king: in a
letter thanking King James I for the gift of his Latin works to Cambridge, he
compared these volumes themselves to a library far grander than that of the Vatican or
the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But he was also willing to dare to offer some
unwanted advice when it was needed: in an oration on 8 October 1623 capping the
university's celebration of the safe return of Prince Charles (later Charles I) and
George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, from Spain, Herbert made a forceful plea
for the value of keeping the peace, even though it was clear that the failure to marry
off the prince to the Spanish Infanta made war with Spain more desirable and likely. It
is unclear whether Herbert helped or hurt his chances for secular advancement by
being both witty and principled.

Herbert wrote much of his poetry during his Cambridge years. He began, auspiciously
enough, with a vow, made in a letter accompanying two sonnets sent to his mother as
a New Year's gift in 1610, "that my poor Abilities in Poetry, shall be all, and ever
consecrated to Gods glory." The sonnets are written at a high pitch of enthusiasm—
there are nine astonished rhetorical questions in the first poem alone—as Herbert
yearns to be a fiery martyr, burning with love of God, not women. Herbert was not
alone in wanting to redirect poetry from Venus to God: Sir Philip Sidney, Robert
Southwell, and Donne, among others, urged the same thing, and even King James
helped encourage this kind of revolution by writing and publishing his own religious
poems. But these two sonnets have the force of personal discovery behind them, and
they are a preview of a cluster of later poems in The Temple that examine his
willingness and ability to write religious verse. As in so many of his best poems,
exuberance betrays a deep sense of disorder and nervousness.

It is difficult to date most of Herbert's poems with certainty, but it is clear that not all
his early poetic efforts were the kind of impassioned sacred lyrics promised by the
sonnets he sent to his mother. His various occasional pieces—poems on the death of
Prince Henry (oldest son of James I) in 1612 and Queen Anne (wife of James I) in
1619, to the queen of Bohemia in exile, to his friends Francis Bacon and Donne—
show that Herbert, like his contemporaries, viewed and used poetry as a medium of
social discourse, not just self-analysis and devotion. And even the bulk of Herbert's
early religious poetry is public and didactic rather than introspective and meditative.
His modern reputation rests almost exclusively on the devotional lyrics collected in
"The Church," the middle section of The Temple, and while some of these lyrics may
have been written as early as 1617, there is good reason to believe that most of them
date from much later, from the mid 1620s to the last years of his life at Bemerton. But
"The Church" is carefully positioned between two long poems, "The Church-porch"
and "The Church Militant," both of which are early pieces much different from the
later lyrics.

Amy M. Charles, Herbert's most thorough and meticulous biographer, suggests that
"The Church-porch" was perhaps written as early as 1614 and that at least on one
level it is a poem of advice addressed to his brother Henry, one year younger than
George but already a man of the world and living in France. The two brothers shared a
love of proverbs, and indeed what saves the poem from turning into a plodding
collection of "thou shalt nots" is Herbert's ability to release the dramatic as well as the
moral potential of some of these proverbs. In the context of The Temple, "The
Church-porch" is intended as a kind of secular catechism instructing a young man in
basic moral principles and manners to prepare him for life in society and, more
important, entrance into the church, a place where he will encounter moral and
spiritual problems of a different sort.

During this time at Cambridge, Herbert also composed a substantial amount of Latin
poetry. This, of course, should be no surprise: grammar school and university
education was largely a matter of immersion in classical texts and repeated exercise in
copying, translating, and imitating Latin authors. The Renaissance turn to distinctively
national literature and the Reformation turn to vernacular Bible translations and
church services by no means displaced Latin as the international language for
diplomats and scholars and as the common vehicle for many types of serious
disputation, religious devotion, and intellectual and poetic wit and playfulness.
Writing Latin poetry was a natural development of Herbert's day-to-day activities at
Cambridge and—because of the particular traditions of Latin and Neo-Latin literature
that he knew intimately and the learned audience to which Latin works would be
directed—allowed him to use different poetic voices than the ones he cultivated in his
English lyrics.

Musae Responsoriae (1662) is a series of energetically witty and satiric "Epigrams in

Defense of the Discipline of Our Church" meant to counter the attacks of Scottish
Presbyterian Andrew Melville, whose poem Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria pictured the
British church as insufficiently reformed and still too beholden to Roman Catholic
ceremonies, rituals, and accompaniments to worship. The publication of Melville's
poem in 1620 perhaps provided Herbert with an opportunity to assert himself as the
newly appointed orator of Cambridge—the universities were, after all, under siege by
Melville, who criticized both Oxford and Cambridge for not supporting Puritan
reform—and an occasion to clarify his own notion of the ideal British church. As in
"The Church Militant," Herbert was deeply critical of what he felt were the many
excesses of Roman Catholicism, but he was not sympathetic to Melville's "vain fears
of the Vatican She-wolf" and the puritanical drive to purge the church of music,
traditional prayers, vestments, and bishops.

For Herbert, Roman Catholics and Puritans are brothers, twin dangers like Scylla and
Charybdis between which the British church must navigate: the via media is best, a
theme that he returns to in one of the poems in The Temple, "The British
Church." Musae Responsoriae is filled with comic caricatures of abrasive Puritan
preachers and disorderly worshipers; respectful addresses to King James, Prince
Charles, and Lancelot Andrewes as custodians of the peace threatened by the Puritans;
and satiric analysis of Melville's ridiculous desire to create a church of nakedness and
noise to replace one of visual beauty and music. It is a witty volume aimed to tease
and please, but it is also an integral part of Herbert's lifelong attempt to define his
church—no mean feat, since neither Scylla nor Charybdis can or should be banished
—and his place within it, as defender and worshiper.

Herbert's two other collections of Latin poems written during the early 1620s are
comprised primarily of sacred rather than satiric and controversial epigrams. Lucus (a
"Sacred Grove") is a somewhat loosely arranged miscellany that includes poems on
Christ, the pope, the Bible, and several biblical episodes and figures, including Martha
and Mary, and examines an assortment of topics such as love, pride, affliction, and
death. Several of the poems, like those in Musae Responsoriae, use irony for satiric
purposes.

The decrepit fate of Rome is ingeniously discovered in its very name, "Roma," which
can be construed as an anagram depicting its decline from the glorious days of Virgil
("Maro") to the present day, when hate has banished love ("Amor"). But in most of
the poems irony and paradox are used to convey the miraculous and mysterious power
of Christ. Herbert's emphasis is not on careful, rational argumentation but bold,
dramatic astonishment, as in the brief but dazzling lines "On the stoning of Stephen":
"How marvelous! Who pounds rock gets fire. But Stephen from stones got heaven."
The longest poem in the collection, "The Triumph of Death," indicts man's ironic
misuse of intelligence to create weapons and other instruments of death, but the
greater irony, revealed in the following poem, "The Christian's Triumph: Against
Death," is that benign images of Christ—the lamb, the Cross—overwhelm even the
most threatening spears, bows, and battering rams.

The 21 poems of Passio Discerpta are much more unified than those in Lucus, each
focusing on some aspect of Christ's Crucifixion. Like Richard Crashaw's sacred
epigrams, written some ten years later, these poems are intensely, even grotesquely,
visual, but, unlike Crashaw's, Herbert's prevailing emotion is calm wonderment rather
than ecstatic excitement. The description of the Passion of Christ is remarkably
dispassionate: the poetic witness is not cold or distant but is moved primarily by the
redemptive purpose rather than the melodramatic circumstances of the Crucifixion.
He is transfixed and indelibly marked by what he sees—"I, joyous, and my mouth
wide open, / Am driven to the drenched cross"—and he is well aware that the death of
Christ crushes the world and, as he imagines it, grinds the human heart to powder. But
these poems, as baroque and intense as they may seem to be on the surface, are
written from the secure perspective of one who feels at every moment that the
inimitable sacrifice of Christ "lightens all losses."

Though the Latin poems of Musae Responsoriae, Lucus, and Passio Discerpta are

relatively early works in Herbert's canon and represent a distinctive stage in the
development of his style and ideas, they are by no means mere apprentice work,
disconnected from his later efforts. Thematically, these collections have much in
common with the poems of "The Church" and illustrate that these later lyrics are the
result of lifelong meditation on certain themes, not spontaneous or occasional
poeticizing. And, stylistically, the Latin poems, relying heavily on compression,
paradox, wordplay, and climactic moments of understated surprise, are at least in
some ways the foundation of what has been called Herbert's "metaphysical wit." Such
poems as "The Agonie" and "Redemption" may be more finely crafted and powerful
than any of the verses in Passio Discerpta, but they are deeply akin to them.

Poetry was not all that was on Herbert's mind at Cambridge. He was worried about
money: not for any extravagant purposes, but simply to live on. His university
position paid him modestly, and the yearly portion assigned him in his father's will
was administered by his brother Edward and usually sent late and begrudgingly. He
sought and probably got help from his stepfather, but, especially for someone who, as
Ferrar describes him, valued his "independencie," financial insecurity was a great
source of frustration. And he worried about his health. In several of his letters he tells
of being sick, restricted to a very careful (and expensive) diet, and too weak to fulfill
his daily duties. "I alwaies fear'd sickness more then death," he wrote to his mother,
"because sickness has made me unable to perform those Offices for which I came into
the world."

Ill health troubled him for his entire adult life, and although many of the "afflictions"
he describes in The Temple are spiritual, his intimate knowledge of the precarious
state of the human body makes such poems as "Church-monuments" and "The
Flower" particularly moving. However, Herbert's primary concern during the 1620s,
more than health or money, was choosing his vocation, a recurrent theme in "The
Church." In a letter to John Danvers, dated March 18, 1618, he mentions his plans for
a spiritual vocation as a long-acknowledged fact, not an agonizing crisis: "You know,
Sir, how I am now setting foot into Divinity, to lay the platform of my future life."
But this did not keep him from other pursuits: his public position as orator, which he
defended as having "no such earthiness in it, but it may very well be joined with
Heaven," and friendships with ambitious and powerful men at court and such as
Francis Bacon and John Williams. These two men bolstered Herbert's hope that
secular and sacred interests could be fruitfully reconciled: Bacon was lord chancellor
and translator of Certain Psalmes (1625), dedicated to Herbert; and Williams was a
holy bishop and a formidable power broker and patron at court and for a time
Herbert's greatest benefactor.

After many early successes Herbert's chances for advancement began to falter. His
highly placed friends died (Ludovick Stuart, second Duke of Lennox, in 1624 and
James Hamilton, second Marquis of Hamilton, in 1625) or tumbled as a result of
political infighting. (Bacon's fall into disgrace after going to trial for accepting bribes
may have taught Herbert a great deal about the vagaries of power and the difficulty of
reconciling morality and public greatness; and Williams went into retreat after losing
battles with first Buckingham and then Laud.) His stepfather and his good friend
Ferrar struggled in vain to save one of their pet projects and investments, the Virginia
Company, formed to both colonize the New World and help spread the Gospel. After
the king dissolved the corporation, Ferrar removed himself to a life of devotion at
Little Gidding, while Danvers, much more volatile and angry, intensified both his
gardening at his house in Chelsea and his political agitating. Two decades later he was
actively fighting against Charles I and ultimately became one of the regicides, directly
responsible for the king's execution.

The power and reputation of some of Herbert's influential friends and family members
were thus certainly being challenged and weakened at this time, but Walton
drastically oversimplifies Herbert's character by identifying thwarted ambition as his
primary motivation in moving closer to the priesthood. Although we cannot know for
sure, it is just as likely that Herbert was deeply influenced by firsthand experience of
the world of business, political intrigue, and court maneuvering and discovered not so
much that it did not offer him a place as that it did not suit him. His youthful
confidence that the sacred and the secular could be harmonized was not confirmed by
the lives of those around him, and his attendance at the particularly tumultuous
Parliament of 1624 more likely stifled than fanned any desire for a public political
career. Years later, in The Country Parson, he recommended political service as a
necessary part of the education of a gentleman: "for there is no School to a
Parliament." But the lesson he learned there may be one stated simply in his poem
"Submission," where he finds that worldly success and divine service are not easily
blended: "Perhaps great places and thy praise / Do not so well agree."

Late in 1624 Herbert was preparing to take holy orders. Doing so would preclude any
further service in Parliament and cut him off from many types of secular employment,
but would be necessary for him to remain at Cambridge. (Fellows and other officials
at the universities were required to take holy orders, normally within seven years of
obtaining a master's degree, a vestige of the medieval origin of the university as
primarily a training ground for church service.) But at this time Herbert was leaving
both Parliament and Cambridge behind. He was largely absent from Cambridge and
delegated most of his duties to others. He did not return even to deliver the funeral
oration commemorating the death of King James on  March 27, 1625, and though he
was not officially replaced as the university orator until January 1628, he had
basically begun his removal from the Cambridge community by late 1623.
Ordination as a deacon, which Amy M. Charles suggests occurred in late 1624, by no
means resolved the major problems of Herbert's life and in fact may have coincided
with a heightening of them. He was presented by Bishop John Williams with several
church livings, one at Llandinam in his home county of Montgomeryshire in 1624 and
another at Lincoln Cathedral in Huntingtonshire near Little Gidding in 1626, and
these brought him at least modest income and required only a minimal effort of
supervising some church functions and preaching once a year at Lincoln Cathedral.
But this was not enough to support him, and between 1624 and 1629, with no house of
his own, he stayed with a succession of friends and relatives: with "a friend in Kent,"
his stepfather and mother at Chelsea, his brother Henry at Woodford, and Henry
Danvers, Earl of Danby (John Danvers's brother), at Dauntesey House in Wiltshire.

His financial condition improved substantially when in July 1627 a Crown grant made
him part owner (with his brother Edward and Thomas Lawley, a cousin) of some land
in Worcestershire, which was then sold to his brother Henry. The grant, about which
little is known, may have assured Herbert that his family was not completely
neglected (perhaps his estimate of his own current fate) nor out of royal favor (the
frequent state of Edward, whose life as a courtier and diplomat oscillated between
royal grace and disgrace), and the money he gained from the sale of the land was
certainly welcome. Charles suggests that it allowed him to resign his position at
Cambridge and gave him the wherewithal to turn toward one of the favorite projects
of his later life, rebuilding churches, an activity he undertook not only at Leighton
Bromswald but also at Bemerton. But the fact remains that at this time Herbert was
still without a settled vocation.

Many of the poems of "The Church" focus on the problems of finding a proper
vocation. Some, such as "Affliction (I)" and "Employment (I)" and "Employment
(II)", seem to be early meditations on Herbert's uneven progress toward finding a
position that might satisfy both his and God's desires. Others, such as "The
Priesthood" and "Aaron," are undoubtedly later poems reflecting on the specific
implications of his decision to become a priest. "The Crosse," though, describes an
intermediate stage, one at which Herbert was distressingly stuck in 1626, the probable
date of this poem. The speaker seeks "some place, where I might sing, / And serve
thee," but he comes to realize that the consequences of this desire are far more
overwhelming than he had anticipated. "Wealth and familie," and indeed any sense
that even the most dedicated believer brings something useful to Christ, prove to be
irrelevancies and must be set aside. This "strange and uncouth thing," the Cross,
completely disrupts one's normal life, and any potentially heartening illusions about
"My power to serve thee" are replaced by an awareness that "I am in all a weak
disabled thing."
Joseph H. Summers describes the years between 1626 and 1629 as "the blackest of all
for Herbert," filled with anxious concern—conveyed in such poems as "The
Crosse"—not only about his spiritual duties but also his physical health. In Walton's
words Herbert was "seized with a sharp Quotidian Ague" in 1626 that required a full
year of careful diet and convalescence. And not long after, in June of 1627, his mother
died, an event that affected him in complex, even contradictory ways. The death of a
parent—and in Herbert's case, of his one parent—can be an emotional shock that is
both devastating and liberating, confusing and clarifying. Herbert indeed moves
through this wide range of response in the 19 Latin and Greek poems that make
up Memoriae Matris Sacrum, registered for publication along with Donne's funeral
sermon on Magdalen Herbert on July 7, 1627, a month after her death.
Memoriae Matris Sacrum the only collection of poems he published during his
lifetime. (Although Lucus, Passio Discerpta, and the poems of The Temple were
carefully copied out in manuscript, no doubt in preparation for eventual publication,
they did not appear until after his death.) This may be explained by the prevailing
norms of poetic practice for nonprofessionals at the time, which allowed for the
publication of heroic, historical, and occasional poems, particularly of public
celebration and mourning, but discouraged anything more than the circulation of other
poems in manuscript, followed perhaps by posthumous publication.

The death of his mother was followed by decisive changes in Herbert's life. He
separated himself finally from Cambridge (another of his mothers, alma mater) and
went to stay at Dauntesey House in the countryside, where he recovered his health,
probably wrote and revised some of the poems that would be gathered in "The
Church." Herbert and Jane Danvers (his stepfather’s cousin) married on March 5,
1629.  The marriage consolidated his relationship with the Danvers family, with
whom he seemed to be very attached; eased his transition to life in Wiltshire, where
he seemed to be gravitating; and allowed him to make practical plans for setting up
his own household and accepting the vocation at which he had long aimed. By the end
of 1630, Herbert he was an ordained priest settled in the small parish of Bemerton,
where he spent the few remaining years of his life. His long-awaited ordination as a
priest occurred September 19, 1630, three years before his death on March 1, 1633.
He is remembered as a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly
influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist of
his or any other time.

¶    A Wreath.

A Wreathed garland of deserved praise,

 Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knowest all my wayes,
My crooked winding wayes, wherein I live,
Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,
To thee, who art more farre above deceit,
Then deceit seems above simplicitie.
Give me simplicitie, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know, thy wayes,
Know them and practise them: then shall I give
For this poore wreath, give thee a crown of praise.

¶   Nature.

FUll of rebellion, I would die,

Or fight, or travell, or denie
That thou hast ought to do with me.
O tame my heart;
It is thy highest art
To captivate strong holds to thee.

If thou shalt let this venome lurk,

And in suggestions fume and work,
My soul will turn to bubbles straight,
And thence by kinde
Vanish into a winde,
Making thy workmanship deceit.

O smooth my rugged heart, and there

Engrave thy rev’rend Law and fear;
Or make a new one, since the old
Is saplesse grown,
And a much fitter stone
To hide my dust, then thee to hold.
A Dialogue-Anthem

Alas, poor Death! Where is thy glory?

Where is thy famous force, thy ancient sting?
Alas, poor mortal, void of story!
Go spell and read how I have killed thy King.
Poor Death! And who was hurt thereby?
Thy curse being laid on Him makes thee accurst.
Let losers talk, yet thou shalt die;
These arms shall crush thee.
Spare not, do thy worst.
I shall be one day better than before;
Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.
Sir Philip Sidney
1554–1586
The grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and heir presumptive to the earls of
Leicester and Warwick, Sir Philip Sidney was not himself a nobleman. Today he is
closely associated in the popular imagination with the court of Elizabeth I, though he
spent relatively little time at the English court, and until his appointment as governor
of Flushing in 1585 received little preferment from Elizabeth. Viewed in his own age
as the best hope for the establishment of a Protestant League in Europe, he was
nevertheless a godson of Philip II of Spain, spent nearly a year in Italy, and sought out
the company of such eminent Catholics as the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion.
Widely regarded, in the words of his late editor William A. Ringler, Jr., as "the model
of perfect courtesy," Sidney was in fact hot-tempered and could be surprisingly
impetuous. Considered the epitome of the English gentleman-soldier, he saw little
military action before a wound in the left thigh, received 23 September 1586 during
an ill-conceived and insignificant skirmish in the Netherlands outside Zutphen, led to
his death on 17 October, at Arnhem. Even his literary career bears the stamp of
paradox: Sidney did not think of himself as primarily a writer, and surprisingly little
of his life was devoted to writing.

Philip, the first child of Sir Henry Sidney and his wife, Mary, née Dudley, was born in
1554 at Penshurst in Kent, "on Friday the last of November, being St. Andrews day, a
quarter before five in the morning." Present at the birth were his royal Spanish
godfather and his maternal grandmother, whose husband, John Dudley, Duke of
Northumberland, and son Guildford had been beheaded in 1553 following the failure
of the Northumberland plan to place Guildford's wife, Lady Jane Grey, on the throne.

It was an auspicious beginning to an often fatherless childhood. In 1559 Queen

Elizabeth appointed Sir Henry lord president of the Marches of Wales, a post that
required him to spend months at a time away from home. As painful as his absence
from family must have been to Sir Henry, his absence from Penshurst could only have
compounded his distress. In the 1590 Arcadia Sidney recalled in the character
Kalander's house the warmth, serviceability, and understated grace of the Sidney
home:
The house itself was built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any
extraordinary kind of fineness, as an honorable representing of firm stateliness; the
lights, doors and stairs, rather directed to the use of the guest than to the eye of the
artificer, and yet, as the one chiefly heeded, so the other not neglected; each place
handsome without curiosity, and homely without loathsomeness, not so dainty as not
to be trod on, nor yet slubbered up with good fellowship—all more lasting than
beautiful (but that the consideration of the exceeding lastingness made the eye believe
it was exceeding beautiful).

The dominance of women in the poet's early life was doubtless formative. Sidney's
skill in portraying female characters, from the bewitching, multifarious Stella
of Astrophil and Stella (1591) to Philoclea and Pamela, the bold, beautiful, and
articulate princesses of the Old Arcadia (written circa 1581) and the New
Arcadia (1590; written circa 1583-1584) is, as C. S. Lewis notes in his English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), without equal
before William Shakespeare. The two versions of the Arcadia, Sidney's most
ambitious works, were written under the guiding spirit and often in the presence of
Mary Sidney Herbert, his "dear Lady and sister, the Countess of Pembroke," herself a
great patron of writers, to whom the two versions of the Arcadia are dedicated. Mary
went on to serve as Sidney's literary executor after his death.

Nor can the benevolent influence of Sidney's mother, Lady Mary, be doubted. Lady-
in-waiting to the queen, she contracted the smallpox in October 1562 while caring for
Elizabeth during her bout with the sickness. Her face severely disfigured, Lady Mary
thereafter avoided appearing at court. According to Ben Jonson in the Conversations
with Drummond, when Lady Mary could not avoid appearing in public she wore a
mask. Four of Sidney's Certain Sonnets (8-11) that lament the damage done to a
beautiful face by disease may owe something to his memory of his mother's ordeal.
And his portrait of the long-suffering Parthenia in the New Arcadia, whose lover
Argalus, marries her despite her ruined beauty, clearly echoes his mother's plight and
his father's continuing devotion.

On 17 October 1564 Sir Henry enrolled the nine-year-old Philip in Shrewsbury

School, the same day that Philip's lifelong friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, First
Lord Brooke, was enrolled. Although far from Penshurst, Shrewsbury was a logical
choice for Sidney's early education. The town was under Sir Henry's jurisdiction and
boasted a fine grammar school under the direction of its headmaster, Thomas Ashton.
The rigors of Elizabethan education—in winter students were at their studies from six
o'clock in the morning until four-thirty in the afternoon—suited Sidney's precocity
and his extraordinary self-discipline. The curriculum was almost entirely in Latin,
though modern languages seem to have had some place at Shrewsbury. An account of
Philip's expenses at school includes an entry "for two quires of paper, for example
books, phrases and sentences in Latin and French." Another account records
expenditures for a book of Virgil and a catechism of Calvin, testifying to the school's
mix of classical and Puritan values. Philip may even have developed his taste and love
for drama by acting in the didactic plays that were a staple of many Elizabethan
grammar schools, including Shrewsbury.

At school he demonstrated a remarkable mastery of academic subjects. Greville

reports that, "even his teachers found something in him to observe, and learn, above
that which they had usually read, or taught." Greville may have appraised Sidney's
accomplishments fairly accurately. The physician Thomas Moffett, a friend of the
Sidneys and another early biographer of Philip, notes his mastery of grammar,
rhetoric, mathematics, Latin, French, and some Greek. But the remarkable trait of
Sidney's mind was that he saw the aim of human life to be, as he said of poetry in The
Defence of Poetry (1595), "well-doing, and not of well-knowing only." Though
Moffett comments that Sidney neglected games and sports "for the sake of literary
studies," he developed into a handsome young man with a natural grace and
considerable athletic prowess. His excellent horsemanship would later make him,
despite delicate health, a champion in tiltyards and tournaments. Greville's
observation that Philip's "very play tend[ed] to enrich his mind" seems close to the
mark. A similar desire to make all experience educational distinguishes the childhood
of Pyrocles and Musidorus, the precocious hero-princes of the Arcadias.

Twice during his school days at Shrewsbury, Sidney traveled to Oxford for
ceremonies over which Queen Elizabeth presided. On the first trip, in August 1566, he
resided at Lincoln College and must have enjoyed a privileged view of the queen's
activities, as he was in the company of his uncle, Robert Dudley, first Earl of
Leicester and chancellor of the university. Sidney's servant, Thomas Marshall,
recorded that on the return trip to Shrewsbury, his master gave twelve pence to a blind
harper at Chipping Norton--a moment Sidney may have recalled years later in The
Defence of Poetry, when he reflected on the pleasures of lyric: "I never heard the old
song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet;
and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style."
The second trip to Oxford came early in 1568, just before he completed his studies at
Shrewsbury. On that occasion, according to his horoscope, he "delivered an oration
before her most serene Highness that was both eloquent and elegant."

Shortly after his 1568 visit, Sidney returned to Oxford as a student at Christ Church,
where it seems he studied for three years. He soon established a reputation for
excellence in public debate. Richard Carew recalls in his Survey of Cornwall (1602)
an incident when "being a scholar in Oxford of fourteen years age, and three years
standing, upon a wrong conceived opinion touching my sufficiency I was ... called to
dispute ex tempore (impar congressus Achilli) with the matchless Sir Philip Sidney, in
presence of the Earls Leicester, Warwick, and other great personages."

During his Oxford years a marriage was proposed between Philip and Anne, Cecil,
daughter of Sir William Cecil, that would have linked the Sidneys to one of the most
powerful families of the realm. But when Sir William's investigations revealed that
the Sidneys were relatively poor, his enthusiasm waned, and relations between the two
families cooled. Anne later married Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Like most men of his rank Sidney left Oxford without taking a degree. After
recovering from the plague in the spring of 1572, he may have spent a term at
Cambridge. During this time his family was busy with preparations for his first tour of
the Continent. A peace treaty between England and France, concluded in April,
provided the opportunity. Late the following month he was given permission to travel
to Paris as a member the delegation accompanying Lord High Admiral Edward de
Fiennes, Ninth Earl of Lincoln, with a license from Elizabeth for "her trusty and well-
beloved Philip Sidney, Esquire, to go out of England into parts beyond the seas" for a
period of two years. By her instructions he was to attain knowledge of foreign
languages. Leicester commended his nephew to Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris, Sir
Francis Walsingham, who would become Sidney's friend, adviser, and father-in-law.
Sidney was not yet eighteen years old.

Such trips were rare among Englishmen of Sidney's day. For him it was to be most
fateful, contributing deeply to his education and preparing him for a career in the
service of the state. Traveling with Griffin Madox, his Welsh servant, and Lodowick
Bryskett, a London-born gentleman of Italian parents, Sidney arrived in Paris in early
June. There he participated in official ceremonies marking the Treaty of Blois. He and
his companions remained in Paris for the summer, where Sidney cultivated the
friendship--and earned the admiration--of an extraordinary variety of people, included
Walsingham, the rhetorician Peter Ramus, the printer Andrew Wechel, and perhaps
even the distinguished Huguenot Hubert Languet, his future mentor, whose friendship
he cultivated later in Strasbourg. But Sidney impressed not only Protestant
intellectuals. In early August 1572, King Charles IX created him "Baron de
Sidenay"--partly in recognition of his unusual personal appeal and partly in an effort
to cultivate powerful English Protestants. Because Elizabeth disliked foreign titles,
Sidney did not sign himself "Baron Sidney" in England, though his friends on the
Continent regularly addressed him by that title.

This successful summer ended in horror. The marriage in late August of Charles IX's
sister Margaret de Valois to the Huguenot King Henry III of Navarre was designed to
end a decade of bloodshed between French Catholics and Protestants. Over the
summer soberly dressed Huguenots from the provinces and splendidly attired
Catholics of King Charles's family and the French nobility had flocked to Paris for the
wedding. Rumor swelled that the Huguenots would attempt a coup d'état after the
wedding. On the Catholic side, even before the wedding, Henri I de Lorraine, Duke of
Guise (with the assent of Catherine de' Médicis), had been plotting the assassination
of Adm. Gaspard de II de Coligny, the most able and powerful of Navarre's advisers.

Sidney witnessed many of the events of the week of 17-23 August 1572: secular and
religious wedding ceremonies, important state meetings, and lavish evening
entertainments. Festivities ended abruptly on Friday morning, when a sniper's bullet
wounded Admiral de Coligny in the arm and finger. The Guise plot had been
irrevocably launched. After a day of well-coordinated planning, the Saint
Bartholomew's Day Massacre began in earnest just after midnight on Sunday, 23
August. All over Paris, Huguenot men, women, and children were rounded up and
killed. The recuperating Coligny was murdered and his body thrown into the street.
Peter Ramus was ambushed and butchered, his corpse was hurled from a window, and
its entrails were dragged through the city. Languet himself barely escaped a gang of
assassins. News of the violence spread beyond the city, and thousands more
Protestants were dispatched in Lyons, Orléans, Bordeaux, and other regions.

How much of the slaughter Sidney witnessed in Paris is not known. Perhaps he was
among the Englishmen who found refuge with Walsingham at the English embassy
outside the city walls. Perhaps he was part of an English group taken to view the
mutilated corpse of Coligny. He seems to have been in little danger; there is evidence
that influential Catholics were careful to protect their English visitors. Nevertheless,
when word of the violence reached England, the queen's council commanded
Walsingham to secure Sidney's safe passage back to England. These instructions
arrived too late, for Walsingham had already spirited Sidney away toward Germany.
He never returned to France.

Arriving in Frankfurt via Strasbourg, Sidney had the leisure over the following winter
to establish his friendship with the fifty-four-year-old bachelor Hubert Languet, envoy
of the elector of Saxony, with whom he was to exchange a voluminous and invaluable
correspondence in Latin for more than a decade. The stately and erudite Languet, one
of the leading Huguenot figures of Europe, took what now seems a more-than-fatherly
interest in Sidney's personal well-being, the development of his scholarship, and the
friendships he established on the Continent. He saw in the brilliant young Englishman
a potential leader in an effort he himself regarded as essential: to interest England in
an alliance for the protection of European Protestants.

After visiting Vienna for several months in 1573, Sidney set out in late August or
early September on a brief trip into Hungary that extended into a three-month stay.
His experience there is fondly remembered in The Defence of Poetry in a passage
praising lyric songs: "In Hungary I have seen it the manner at all feasts, and other
such meetings, to have the songs of their ancestors' valor, which that right soldierlike
nation think one of the chiefest kindlers of brave courage." In his first letter to Sidney,
dated September 1573, Languet chided him for not having revealed his plans: "When
you left [Vienna] you said that you would not be gone for more than three days. But
now, like a little bird that has forced its way through the bars of its cage, your delight
makes you restless, flitting hither and yon, perhaps without a thought for your
friends."

When Sidney announced his intention to visit Italy, Languet, envisioning an even
longer and more dangerous separation from his protégé, could win from him only a
promise that he would not visit Rome. Some of this anxiety was quite practical: the
more tolerant cities of northern Italy were reasonably safe for Protestant travelers, but
this was not so farther south, where the Inquisition held sway. But Languet's letters
reveal his fear that Sidney's youth and tolerant disposition would make him, despite
events of the previous summer, susceptible to the persuasion of Catholics.

Because of their reputation for religious and intellectual tolerance, Venice and the
university city of Padua were natural destinations for Englishmen who wanted to see
Italy. Again traveling with Bryskett and Madox, Sidney reached Venice in early
November 1573. He spent most of the following year there and in Padua, with
excursions to Genoa and Florence. In letters to Languet from Venice and Padua he
recounted meeting his distant cousin Richard Shelley (an ancestor of the Romantic
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a longtime resident of the city), an erudite man who
was, in Sidney's phrase, "sadly addicted to Popery." In Venice he also met a variety of
important Europeans.

Sidney immersed himself in Italian culture--so much so that in one letter Languet
addressed him as "you Italians," and Walsingham began to be concerned that the
young man was wavering in his faith. The philosopher Giordano Bruno, who later
traveled to Oxford under Sidney's auspices and dedicated verses to him, recorded that
Sidney enjoyed an excellent reputation during this visit. Yet one of Languet's replies
to a now-missing letter suggests that Sidney was not overly smitten with Venice's
fabled charms, and in a 1578 letter to his brother Robert, Sidney roundly criticized the
"tyrannous oppression" and "counterfeit learning" he observed in Italy, though he
admitted to admiring Italian arms and horsemanship.

By February 1574 Sidney was sufficiently prominent in Venice to sit for a portrait
(now lost) by the Venetian master Paolo Veronese. Languet seems to have found it
indifferently pleasing. There are now extant only two primary likenesses of Sidney,
neither painted ad vivum: the youthful Longleat portrait, dated 1578; and the
Penshurst portrait executed for his brother, Robert, probably in the 1590s.

The renowned university at Padua, to which Sidney repaired in January 1574,

provided a focus for his voluminous reading and improved his mastery of languages,
particularly Latin. At Languet's suggestion he translated "Cicero into French, then
from French into English, and then back into Latin again by an uninterrupted
process." But he demurred at Languet's recommendation that he study German: "Of
the German language I quite despair, for it has a certain harshness about it." He
complained that at his age he had no hope of mastering it, "even so as to understand
it." He seems also to have studied astronomy and geometry--the latter because he had
"always had the impression that it is closely related to military science." His reading
included a vast range of subjects. According to John Buxton, he read works on
Venetian government (considered the model of European nations), world history, a
book on the Council of Trent, and collections of letters by Paolo Manzio, Bernardo
Tasso, Pietro Bembo, and Lorenzo de' Medici--as well as several books on impresa,
the emblematic devices that he would put to great creative use in his life and writings.

Sidney also read widely in Italian poetry and criticism, which he chose not to mention
to Languet. Like many of his contemporaries he held Italian literature in high esteem,
and his work was significantly shaped by Italian influences. His reference in The
Defence of Poetry to Dante's Beatrice (in the Paradiso rather than the Vita nuova) is
the first by an Englishman. Jacopo Sannazaro, twice mentioned as an authority in The
Defence of Poetry , through his Arcadia (1504) contributed to Sidney's understanding
of pastoral romance. The valiant hero of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, (1532),
also twice mentioned in the Defence, helped shape the characters of Pyrocles and
Musidorus in the Arcadia . Though he resists the influence of Petrarch and his
followers in Astrophil and Stella, Sidney's awareness of Petrarchism is everywhere
apparent.

In August 1574, after ten months in Italy, Sidney left Venice for Languet's house in
Vienna, where he fell seriously ill. Nursed back to health by Languet, he spent the
winter of 1574-1575 enjoying the friendship of that city's important men. His most
intimate friend at the time was Edward Wotton, whom Walsingham had appointed to
a post in Vienna. The friendship would last until Sidney's death. At the beginning
of The Defence of Poetry he recalls how during his stay in Vienna he and "the right
virtuous Edward Wotton" studied horsemanship under the famed John Pietro
Pugliano, the Italian maestro of the Emperor Maximilian II's stables:
according to the fertileness of the Italian wit, [Pugliano] did not only afford us the
demonstration of his practice, but sought to enrich our minds with the contemplations
therein, which he thought most precious.... Nay, to so unbelieved a point he proceeded
as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a prince as to be a good horseman--skill
of government was but a pedanteria in comparison. Then would he add certain
praises, by telling what a peerless beast the horse was ... that if I had not been a piece
of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have
wished myself a horse.
Beneath the levity of this passage--part of the fun is that in its original Greek the
name Philip (phil-hippos) denotes love of horses--is a tribute to an art that Sidney,
like Wotton, practiced to excellence. That he chose to discourse upon the exercise of
the "peerless beast" as an introduction to his work about the "peerless poet" may seem
peculiar unless we reader realize how highly he regarded horsemanship as an art of
"well-doing" and not of "well-knowing" only. In sonnet 41 of Astrophil and
Stella Sidney recalls the satisfaction of "Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
/ Guided so well that I obtained the prize." In the Arcadia he explores the elements of
horsemanship in greater detail, portraying the dynamics of control, the unspoken trust
and communication between horse and rider, that makes of the two a single composite
being.

Instructions from Leicester to hasten his return to England in the spring of 1575
altered Sidney's planned route through Burgundy and Paris. He followed Languet to
Prague in early March, then joined Wotton in Dresden; after stops in Strasbourg and
Frankfurt the company reached Antwerp at the beginning of May and arrived in
England on the last day of the month--almost exactly three years after his departure.

He found his family well, though still mourning the death, in February 1574, of
Philip's youngest sister, Ambrosia, at the age of ten. This event had prompted from the
queen a letter of uncharacteristically intimate condolence, in view of her usually aloof
and ambivalent treatment of the Sidneys. The same letter commanded Philip's sister
Mary, not yet fourteen, to court. Sir Henry, who had resigned his post as Lord Deputy
of Ireland in 1571, was happily employed as president of the Marches of Wales, but
his wife was seriously depressed through bad health, bereavement, and financial
problems.

Philip Sidney had left England "young and raw," in the words of his uncle Leicester;
he returned in full manhood, having acquired a vast store of new experience and
learning, a network of important Continental friends, and a knowledge of European
political affairs that few Englishmen could match. Eager to enter the service of his
country, he spent the next eighteen months in England, awaiting assignment. During
his first summer at home he and his family witnessed the spectacular entertainments--
pageants, speeches, hunts, tilts, games, animal baitings, and more--presented daily to
the queen during her three-week visit to Kenilworth, Leicester's estate near Warwick.

Later that summer Sidney saw his father off to Ireland, where--much to Sir Henry's
regret--he had been reappointed Lord Deputy. Neglecting his correspondence with his
European friends, Philip spent the autumn and winter in London, where he gave
himself over to the pleasures at court; Elizabeth made him her cupbearer. Letters from
Languet and other friends on the Continent were addressed to him at Leicester House,
and an edition of Ramus's Commentaries (1555) was dedicated to him. During this
period Sidney enjoyed a deepening friendship with Walter Devereux, first Earl of
Essex, Sir Henry's comrade in Ireland. The following summer he accompanied Essex
back to Ireland and was reunited with Sir Henry.

Essex soon fell victim to a plague of dysentery that swept Ireland, and he died on 22
September 1576 in Dublin. Sidney, who had received a letter summoning him to the
earl's bedside, arrived too late. There he found a touching message, written during the
earl's last days, in which he left Philip nothing except the wish that "if God do move
both their hearts ... he might match with my daughter." The earl continued, "he is so
wise, so virtuous, so goodly; and if he go on in the course that he hath begun, he will
be as famous and worthy a gentleman as ever England bred." This daughter, Penelope
Devereux, would become the "Stella" of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.

Although Essex's agent, Edward Waterhouse, repeated the hope that Philip and
Penelope would marry, it is unlikely that Philip, much less his father or any of his
mother's Dudley family, took this proposal seriously at the time. He was a man of
twenty-one, Penelope a girl of twelve. Moreover, he longed for a political commission
that would allow him to employ the knowledge and skills he had acquired during his
three years on the Continent. If Astrophil is naively read as an undeflected
representation of Sidney himself, he can be forgiven for his neglect of Penelope,
though it is a neglect that he later regretted when she married Lord Robert Rich in
1581. In the second sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, Astrophil explains that his love for
Stella was the result of a gradual process. In the thirty-third he blames himself for not
having taken advantage of opportunity when it presented itself:
 
But to myself myself did give the blow,

While too much wit (forsooth) so troubled me,

That I respects for both our sakes must show:

And yet could not by rising Morn foresee

How fair a day was near, o punished eyes,

That I had been more foolish or more wise.

When news of the death of Maximilian II of Austria reached England in late October
1576, Sidney seemed to Elizabeth's advisers the logical choice to lead a special
embassy to extend her condolences to the emperor's family. Ostensibly, Sidney's
mission would be strictly formal; its informal purpose was entirely political. Hard
upon this news came the death of the staunch Calvinist Frederick III, Elector of the
Palatinate. Political uncertainty deepened when Spanish mercenaries in the Low
Countries sacked and burned Antwerp as well as other smaller towns. While Sidney
and his entourage visited the courts of Europe, he would use his audiences with heads
of state to enlist their support for the creation of a Protestant League--a mission that
seemed now more urgent and propitious than before.

After two months of preparations, Sidney's instructions were delivered on 7 February

1577, and he left for the Continent at the end of the month. Accompanying him were
two experienced statesmen, Sir Henry Lee and Sir Jerome Bowes, among other career
diplomats, and his personal friends Greville and Sir Edward Dyer, both of whom
figure importantly in Sidney's literary career. At Louvain he charmed the Spanish
governor, Don John, who (abetted by a group of English and Scottish exiles) was
plotting to overthrow Elizabeth, free Mary, Queen of Scots, and marry her. From
Brussels, Sidney's party traveled up the Rhine to Heidelberg, where he greeted Prince
John Casimir, and from thence to Prague, where he accomplished his official mission
of extending the queen's condolences to the family of Maximilian II.

In Prague he also visited Edmund Campion, whom he must have known, if only
casually, from their days at Oxford. To his tutor in Rome, Campion described Sidney,
mistakenly, as "a poor wavering soul" who might be amenable to conversion to the
Roman Church. It is clear that his interest in Sidney was opportunistic. Yet Campion's
words provide no basis for saying, as John Buxton has, that Sidney was cynically
"using all his tact and charm to learn from Campion's own lips how far conversion had
led him on the path of disloyalty." Rather, though Sidney held Campion to be in "a
full wrong divinity"--as he said of Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer in The Defence of
Poetry--he probably admired the gifted and accomplished Jesuit, as many others did.
Sidney genuinely sought "the prayers of all good men" and was happy to assist even
Catholics who would ease the suffering of the poor. The catalogue of the long-
dispersed library at Penshurst, recently discovered by Germaine Warkentin, lists an
edition of the Conference in the Tower with Campion, (1581) published shortly after
Campion's execution. If in fact this book belonged to Philip Sidney, perhaps he hoped
to find in it evidence that Campion had discovered the true religion in the hours before
his death.

On the return trip to England Sidney met with William I of Orange and discussed
plans for a Protestant League. It is a testament to his growing international status--
which S. K. Heninger, Jr. believes was so great as to unsettle Elizabeth herself--that
William offered him his daughter's hand in marriage. The promised dowry included
the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Of course, Elizabeth would never have
tolerated the marriage of one of her most powerful courtiers to a foreign royal family,
no matter how close the interests of England and Orange might be, and the proposal
was not advanced.

In Ireland Sidney had witnessed firsthand Sir Henry's vigorous prosecution of the
campaign against the Irish rebels. Returned from the Continent in the fall of 1577, he
found himself obliged to defend his father's policies. To maintain the English garrison
Sir Henry had ordered the imposition of a cess, or land tax, against certain lords living
within the Pale. The Irish lords resisted the tax and through their effective spokesman,
Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormonde, argued their case before Elizabeth and the
Queen's Council. Sidney entered the debate with his "Discourse on Irish Affairs,"
which survives only in a holograph fragment.

To the modern reader Sidney's reasoning seems shockingly brutal, yet the repression
he advocates is typical of English attitudes toward the Irish during Elizabeth's reign.
He does argue that a tax that exempted no one would ease the suffering of the many,
who had traditionally borne the brunt of taxation: "this touches the privileged ...
persons [who] be all the rich men of the Pale, the burden only lying upon the poor,
who may groan, for their cry cannot be heard." But this argument seems ingenuous,
for further on he advocates a policy of complete subjugation, saying that severe means
are more justified in Ireland than lenity. In the end Sir Henry's fortunes in Ireland
worsened, and he was recalled as Lord Deputy in February 1578.

In the years after 1577 Sidney's political career was frustrated by Elizabeth's interest
in balancing the power of Spain against that of France, a balance she feared would be
upset by the creation of a Protestant League. Thwarted in his political ambition,
Sidney turned his attention briefly to exploration, investing in three New World
voyages by Martin Frobisher. He also began, perhaps as early as 1578, what soon
became an intensive writing career.

Among his first literary projects Sidney experimented with a type of drama that would
reach its most sophisticated form in the seventeenth-century court masque. In 1578 or
1579, for the queen's visit to his uncle Leicester's new estate at Wanstead, he wrote
the pastoral entertainment known as The Lady of May. The only published version,
included in a 1598 edition of Arcadia, is not a text, but rather a detailed transcription
of the production, perhaps done at Sidney's request. Ostensibly a tribute to Elizabeth,
it is a work of some literary merit and considerable political and propagandistic
import.

The Lady of May, a young and beautiful maiden much pursued by country bachelors,
faces an emblematic choice of marriage between two men she likes but does not love:
the wealthy shepherd Espilus, a man "of very small deserts and no faults," and the
pleasing but sometimes violent forester Theron, a man of "many deserts and many
faults." The drama combines several elements that were to figure prominently as
themes and issues in Sidney's later writings, especially Astrophil and Stella and the
Arcadias: the Petrarchan stance of stylized veneration of a lady by her lover, the
pastoral mode of setting and plot, and some dramatized speculations about the uses
and abuses of rhetoric. But like many of his contemporaries, Sidney adapts convention
to topicality; and Elizabeth's own unmarried status together with her apparent pleasure
at the courtship of François, Duke of Alençon and (after 1576) of Anjou are deeply
implicated in this superficially innocuous entertainment. The action was designed to
favor Theron the forester over Espilus the shepherd, in whose country blandness
Sidney intended to reflect Alençon. But "it pleased her Majesty to judge that Espilus
did the better deserve" the Lady of May. Although Sidney left open the way to such a
resolution--the final verses of Espilus and Theron allow for either choice--Elizabeth's
selection of Espilus over Theron illustrates the degree to which Sidney and his queen
saw things differently.
Late in 1579 Sidney made his opposition to Alençon's suit explicit in an open letter to
the queen. By that time the issue had focused the divided loyalties of English
Protestants and Catholics. The queen had been considering Alençon's proposal of
marriage for some time. Her childlessness invited a bitter struggle over succession,
and many English Protestants feared a Catholic consort. Sidney's faction, which
included his father and his powerful uncle Leicester, believed that a French marriage
might lead to civil war.

To the modern reader this letter, "Written ... to Queen Elizabeth, Touching Her
Marriage with Monsieur," seems remarkably frank and fearless of the displeasure it
might bring. Sidney addresses the queen forthrightly as a courtier whose function it is
to advise his monarch. He reminds her that the peace of the land, no less than her own
power, depends upon the confidence of her subjects, a confidence likely to be eroded
by an unpopular marriage. Although he does not mention Alençon's famed ugliness,
as others did, he does rehearse much about her prospective husband that she already
knew and did not need to hear from one of her subjects: that Alençon was "a
Frenchman, and a papist"; that his mother was the notorious Catherine de Médicis,
"the Jezebel of our age" (though he does not directly say that she had engineered the
massacre of Huguenots in 1572); that Alençon himself had sacked La Charité and
Issoire "with fire and sword"; and that his race was afflicted with congenital
"unhealthfulness." Sidney concludes with the warning that "if he do come hither, he
must live here in far meaner reputation than his mind will well brook, having no other
royalty to countenance himself with; or else you must deliver him the keys of your
kingdom, and live at his discretion."

There is no evidence that Elizabeth took umbrage at the letter, but it is difficult to
imagine that it did anything to smooth the troubled relationship that persisted between
the Sidney family and the queen throughout Philip's lifetime. Perhaps Sidney's tone in
the letter owes something to a liminal resentment he felt because of her niggardly
treatment of his father, who, as president of the Marches of Wales and twice as her
lord deputy of Ireland, had been among her ablest subjects. Perhaps too it reflects on
an incident that embroiled Sidney's politics with his personal dignity. Greville reports
that sometime in 1579 Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a staunch supporter of
Alençon's suit, had ordered Sidney off a tennis court in the presence of the French
delegation, calling Sidney "a puppy." Sidney issued a challenge the next day, but the
queen herself intervened to prevent the duel and reminded him of his inferior status--a
rebuke that may have recalled to him as well that de Vere had married Anne Cecil
after her father had found the Sidney family unworthy.

Sidney was absent from the court the next year and probably spent much of the time at
Wilton, his sister's home, composing the Old Arcadia. When he returned to court after
a year in seclusion, Sidney presented Elizabeth with a 1581 New Year's gift of a
"whip garnished with diamonds," signifying by this astonishing Petrarchan gesture his
complete submission to the queen's will in the Alençon affair. That summer his
personal fortunes received a blow when the countess of Leicester bore the earl a son,
thereby depriving Sidney of both lands and title that he stood to inherit as Leicester's
heir presumptive. On the following tilt day, Sidney bore the device S-P-E-R-A-V-I ("I
hoped"), dashed through.

Around 1578 Sidney had begun writing poetry. It was an "unelected vocation," as he
says in The Defence of Poetry , "in these my not old years and idlest times having
slipped into the title of a poet." None of his works was published before 1590, four
years after his death. This fact, together with the brevity and intensity of Sidney's
writing career--no more than seven or eight years, during which he worked
simultaneously on different texts--only complicates the problem of determining when
his works were composed.

Among Sidney's earliest ventures, undertaken with his friends Greville and Dyer,
were attempts at writing a new kind of English poetry grounded not in accentual stress
but in duration of syllables. The work that was in progress by October 1579,
when Edmund Spenser reported it in letters to Gabriel Harvey. These experiments in
quantitative verse, examples of which Sidney incorporated into the Old Arcadia, were
efforts to make English verse conform to the rules of Latin prosody. Although they
never exerted a significant influence upon English metrics, they have long interested
scholars and critics. The dactylic hexameters of Old Arcadia 13 are an example of
what Sidney achieved:
 
Lady, reserved by the heav'ns to do pastors' company honor

Joining your sweet voice to the rural muse of a desert,

Here you fully do find this strange operation of love,

How to the woods love runs as well as rides to the palace.

In his correspondence with Harvey, Spenser also claimed that Sidney, Greville, and
Dyer had formed an English Academy or Areopagus to advance the cause of the new
metrics, a claim that has been investigated many times and is at present widely
doubted.

The years 1579 through 1584 represent the peak of Sidney's literary activity. The
winter of 1579-1580 seems the best conjectural date for his composition of The
Defence of Poetry , probably written in response to Stephen Gosson's School of
Abuse, which was printed in the summer of 1579 and dedicated to Sidney without
permission. The connection with Gosson's work, along with a reference to
Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, also published in 1579 and dedicated to Sidney,
indicate that Sidney began The Defence of Poetry in that year, whereas the sustained
intensity of his argument would seem to make it equally likely that he completed the
work in a relatively short time. It did not appear in print, however, until 1595, which
saw two editions by different printers. William Ponsonby, the established printer for
the Sidney family, entered The Defence of Poetry in the Stationers' Register on 29
November 1594 but seems to have delayed publication until the next year. Before
Ponsonby's text appeared, another edition, titled An Apology for Poetry, was
published by Henry Olney. An unknown number of copies was sold before Ponsonby,
claiming precedence, interceded and halted further sales. Ponsonby's edition was then
printed and sold, and the title page of his edition was also fixed to some liberated
copies of the Olney edition. The Ponsonby text and the De L'Isle manuscript at
Penshurst form the basis of Jan van Dorsten and Katherine Duncan-Jones's definitive
modern edition in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney. (1973).

The Defence of Poetry is undoubtedly the most important critical treatise on poetry
written by an Englishman during the Elizabethan period. It has achieved the status of
a classical text. Although it reflects Sidney's Protestantism, it is nevertheless a worldly
work. Drawing on an extraordinary range of classical and Continental texts, Sidney
sets out to defend "poor poetry" against its attackers and to argue positively that
poetry, whose "final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our
degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of," is the best
vehicle for the "purifying of wit." He disposes his argument according to a traditional
seven-part classical structure, beginning with an introduction or exordium and moving
through the stages of proposition, division, examination and refutation to a final
peroration, and including, as custom permitted, a digressio on a related issue.

Sidney opens his argument by claiming that poetry gave rise to every other kind and
division of learning. For this reason the Romans called the poet vates, "which is as
much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet," such as David revealed himself to be in his
Psalms. With equal reverence the Greeks called the poet a "maker," as do the English
(from the Greek verb poiein, "to make"). In all cases true poetry makes things "either
better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature."
Nature's "world is brazen," Sidney argues; only the poets bring forth a golden one.

Sidney next explains that the poet is able to create this heightened fictive world by
coupling an idea with an image: "the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or
fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is
manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them." The
union of fore-conceit and image results in a poetic event that has extraordinary
"energaic" capacity, that is, the power to move the human will and thus to motivate its
own reproduction. Xenophon's Cyrus is then, a poetic creation so forceful that if
readers comprehend the character, they will be prompted to reproduce its virtues in
their own medium: "so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which
had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus
upon the world to make many Cyruses, if [readers] will learn why and how that maker
made him." It is the replicability of the poetic image among those who understand
why and how it was created that distinguishes poetry from nature. The ongoing
replication of poetic images is what enables our "erected wit" to mitigate against the
effects of our "infected will."

Sidney concludes this narration by presenting his central proposition, the crucial
definition of the process of encoding fore-conceits in images to create energaic poetic
constructs: "Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the
word mimesis--that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth--to speak
metaphorically, a speaking picture--with this end, to teach and delight." This
definition--a tightly composed amalgam of ideas lifted from Aristotle (mimesis),
Plutarch ("speaking picture"), and Horace ("teach and delight")--with its emphasis
upon activity, informs all the theoretical matter of The Defence of Poetry.

In the section devoted to the divisions or kinds of mimetic poetry and their
practitioners, Sidney conceives three types: divine poets who imitate the
"inconceivable excellencies of God," of whom David, Solomon, and pagan poets--
Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer, "though in a full wrong divinity"--are cited as
examples; poets who imitate "matter philosophical," of which there are four subtypes
(moral, natural, astronomical, and historical); and "right poets." Sidney is primarily
concerned with the right poets: "these third be they which most properly do imitate to
teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be; but
range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may
be and should be." They are arrayed in a hierarchy from "the most notable" heroic
poets down to pastoral poets "and certain others, some of these being termed
according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to
write in." But Sidney is quick to point out that verse is but "an ornament and no cause
to poetry." Rather, the "feigning" of "notable images of virtues, vices, or what else,
with that delightful teaching ... must be the right describing note to know a poet by.

The right poet is then set off against other masters of "earthly learning" who claim to
lead men to "virtuous action," an ancient contest developed at length in
Aristotle's Poetics. The poet's principal competitors are two: the moral philosopher, a
figure of "sullen gravity ... rudely clothed ... casting largess ... of definitions, divisions
and distinctions" before him; and the historian, "laden with old mouse-eaten records,"
who knows more about the past than his own age, who is "a wonder to young folks
and a tyrant in table talk." The philosopher maintains that there is no better guide to
virtue than he who "teacheth what virtue is; and teach it not only by delivering forth
his very being, his causes and effects, but also by making known his enemy, vice,
which much be destroyed, and his cumbersome servant, passion, which must be
mastered." For his part the historian claims a significant advantage over the
philosopher in that he teaches an "active" virtue rather than a "disputative" one. The
philosopher delivers virtue "excellent in the dangerless Academy of Plato," but the
historian "showeth forth [Virtue's] honorable face in ... battles." The philosopher
"teacheth virtue by certain abstractions considerations," adds the historian, "but I only
bid you follow the footing of them that have gone before you." Sidney can see no end
to this tedious dispute and so interrupts it by noting only "that the one giveth the
precept, the other the example.

The poet, of course, "standeth for the highest form in the school of learning" because
he is the moderator between the philosopher and the historian. Through the art of
mimesis the poet unites in one event the philosopher's precept and the historian's
example. Rephrasing his earlier argument on fore-conceit and image, Sidney
proclaims that the poet gives "a perfect picture" of something, "so as he coupleth the
general notion with the particular example." He then lists exemplary precepts that
poets encode in speaking pictures: anger, wisdom, temperance, valor, friendship,
remorse, pride, cruelty, and ambition. But the greatest of these is "the most excellent
determination of goodness," as in Xenophon's "feigning" of the prince in Cyrus, in
Virgil's fashioning of a virtuous man in Aeneas and in Sir Thomas More's
representation of an entire commonwealth in his Utopia (1516). The reference to the
Catholic More prompts a brief digression in which Sidney states a general tenet of
mimesis he has not made before: if the poetic artifact is flawed, the fault lies with the
poet, not with poetry. Having made this point, he caps his list by citing the practice of
Jesus, who couched his teachings in lively stories.

Because of its forcefulness, the poet's "feigned example" has as much capacity as the
"true example" for teaching what is to be shunned or followed. Moreover, Sidney
remarks wryly, by reading a representation of, rather than actually duplicating, the
strategy of Darius's faithful servant Zopyrus, who severed his own nose and ears to
persuade the Babylonians that he was a traitor, "you shall save your nose by the
bargain." Conversely, the poet's "moving is of a higher degree than [the philosopher's]
teaching," for which he cites as his authority Aristotle's comments
on gnosis (knowing) and praxis (acting, doing) in the Ethics.
The poet emerges from this examination transformed from "moderator" to monarch.
"Either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music," poetry
has the capacity to transmute even horrors--"cruel battles, unnatural monsters"--into
delightful experience. The effects of poetic invention are such that orators and
prophets have employed it for their several purposes. Menenius Agrippa, Livy tells us,
calmed the mutinous population of Rome not with "figurative speeches or cunning
insinuations" but with a tale of the rebellious body attempting to starve the stomach
and so hurting itself. Similarly, the prophet Nathan revealed to David a precept "most
divinely true" by means of a feigned discourse.

In a second examination section of The Defence of Poetry, Sidney considers the

various subgenres in which poetry is arrayed, with a cautionary comment about overly
rigid distinctions. At the very outset he warns against overdetermining such matters,
noting that "some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds, as the tragical and
comical, whereupon is risen the tragicomical." Anticipating the design of
his Arcadias , he recommends Jacob Sannazaro and Boethius, who "mingled prose
and verse," and others who "mingled matters heroical and pastoral." If severed genres
be good, he concludes, "the conjunction cannot be hurtful."

Sidney moves up the hierarchy of genres from the lowest to the highest, discussing
pastoral, elegy, comedy, lyric, and epic or heroic, "whose very name (I think) should
daunt all backbiters." Characteristically, he reserves his highest praise for the epic,
whose champions--Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tydeus, and Rinaldo--"not only
teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent
truth." Epic is, in short, "the best and most accomplished kind of poetry." He
concludes this second examination with a summary of his major points: that poetry
deals with universal considerations; that (unlike the historian and the philosopher) the
poet is not confined to already delimited parameters of inquiry but brings his own
"stuff" to the act of mimesis, so that he "doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but
maketh a matter out of a conceit"; that poetry teaches goodness and delight; and that
the Scriptures--indeed Christ himself--employed poetry. All this indicates that "the
laurel crown appointed for triumphant captains doth worthily (of all other learnings)
honor the poet's triumph."

Yet such reasoning is not likely to dissuade the misomousoi, the poet-haters, who
wrongly identify poetry with rhyming and versifying, although, Sidney concedes,
poetry often employs verse because "verse far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of
memory." But laying this complaint aside, Sidney begins his refutation with the claim
that poetry and poets stand accused of four principal crimes: that they divert men from
the pursuit of "other more fruitful knowledges"; that poetry "is the mother of lies";
that poetry "is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires"; and that
Plato banished poets from his ideal commonwealth in the Republic.

These charges are, of course, made by straw men whom Sidney will easily hew down.
The first charge he has already demonstrated to be spurious, since of all learning
poetry alone "teacheth and moveth to virtue." "I still and utterly deny," he writes, "that
there is sprung out of the earth a more fruitful knowledge." The second charge, that
poetry fosters lies, occasions a spirited rebuttal that anticipates several hallmark
concepts of structuralist and poststructuralist assumptions about language, such as
arbitrariness and difference. The confidence with which he addresses the third charge,
that poetry fosters "not only love, but lust, but vanity, but (if they list [please])
scurrility," would seem to belie Astrophil's failed attempt to transmute his desire into
spirituality. Nevertheless Sidney maintains that if love poetry leads man astray, we
"need not say that poetry abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth poetry."
Moreover, rather than enervating the spirit of warriors, implicit in the charge that it is
the nurse of abuse, poetry is often "the companion of camps." Thus, Plutarch tells us,
when Alexander went to war he left his teacher Aristotle behind but took Homer with
him.

Of the four charges against poets issued by the poet-haters, Sidney devotes the most
space to refuting the final one, that Plato banned poets from his ideal republic. "But
now indeed," he begins, "my burden is great; now Plato's name is laid upon me,
whom, I confess, of all philosophers I have ever esteemed most worthy of reverence,"
for Plato "is the most poetical." Yet if Plato would "defile the fountain out of which
his flowing streams have proceeded," Sidney says, "let us boldly examine with what
reasons he did it." He claims that philosophers have made a "school-art" out of the
matter that poets have conveyed "by a divine delightfulness," and then cast off their
"guides, like ungrateful apprentices." Yet as Cicero noted, though many cities rejected
philosophers, seven cities wished to claim Homer as a citizen. Simonides and Pindar
made of the tyrant Hiero I a just king while, and here again Sidney follows Cicero,
Plato was made the slave of Dionysius. For a clinching rhetorical effect Sidney,
whose debt to Plato is everywhere apparent in The Defence of Poetry, reminds his
readers that both Plato (in the Symposium and the Phaedrus) and Plutarch condoned
the "abominable filthiness" of homosexuality.

Having thus exposed in Plato crimes far exceeding those of poets, Sidney rehabilitates
his straw man. When he claims that in banning the poet from his republic Plato places
the onus "upon the abuse, not upon poetry," one should remember that he began this
passage by confessing that Plato was the most poetical of philosophers. Plato's
strictures were directed toward practitioners of mimesis rather than mimesis itself:
"Plato therefore ... meant not in general of poets ... but only meant to drive out those
wrong opinions of the Deity (whereof now, without further law, Christianity hath
taken away all the hurtful belief...) nourished by the then-esteemed poets"--as can be
seen in the Ion, where Plato "giveth high and rightly divine commendation unto
poetry." Indeed Plato, who "attributeth unto poesy more than myself do, namely, to be
a very inspiring of a divine force," has been misread: witness Plato's mentor Socrates,
who spent his old age turning Aesop's fables into verse, and Plato's student Aristotle,
who wrote the Poetics--"and why, if it should not be written?" Nor Should one forget
Plutarch, who in writing philosophy and history "trimmeth both their garments with
the guards of poesy."

Following this stirring refutation--actually a set piece with unanticipated ramifications

for his own later work--Sidney considers, in a relevant digression, the lamentable
condition of poetry in England, directing his criticism, characteristically, at poets
rather than poetry. "Sweet poesy," he begins, "that hath anciently [claimed] kings,
emperors, senators, great captains," and which had heretofore flourished in Britain, is
in "idle England" now little more than flimflam, poets having "almost ... the good
reputation as the mountebanks at Venice." "Base men," he asserts, "with servile wits
undertake it ... as if all the Muses were got with child to bring forth bastard poets."
Feigning as burdensome the task of defending poets and their work, only to be
"overmastered by some thoughts" and thus yielding "an inky tribute to them," he
defers authority in the matter of poetry to those who practice it. Restating the hugely
problematic conditions of mimesis he had already presented in the Cyrus passage, he
concludes that "they that delight in poesy itself should seek to know what they do, and
how they do and especially look in the unflattering glass of reason" (emphasis added).
For poetry must be led gently--or rather it must lead, as it cannot be acquired by
"human skill." "A poet no industry can make," Sidney claims in a reaffirmation of the
poet as vates, "if his own genius be not carried into it."

Yet there are English poets who warrant commendation. Sidney is typical of his age in
praising Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385) but exceptional in
acknowledging that Englishmen of his time had not mastered Chaucerian metrics: "I
know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so
clearly, or that we in this age go so stumblingly after him." He also approves of the
brief tragedies gathered in the Mirror for Magistrates (1563) and commends the lyrics
of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who regularized the English sonnet form.

None of this is controversial. However, Sidney's subsequent discussion of The

Shepheardes Calender raises the question of how well, if at all, Sidney and Spenser
were acquainted. He acknowledges that Spenser, who dedicated The Shepheardes
Calender to him in 1579, "hath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy of
reading, if I be not deceived." In his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, Spenser
claimed to have had Sidney "in some use of familiarity." The two poets may have met
at Leicester House, where Spenser was employed and where Sidney was a frequent
guest at the time. Yet they were of vastly different social rank, Sidney being the earl's
nephew and Spenser the earl's secretary. Sidney does not mention Spenser by name in
his discussion of The Shepheardes Calender in The Defence of Poetry. Indeed, after
praising its poetry, Sidney criticizes its author for the "framing of his style to an old
rustic language." After his death in 1586, Sidney's influence upon Spenser was
pervasive. Yet his only comments upon Spenser's work do not suggest the intimacy
between them that Spenser claimed to enjoy.

It is noteworthy that Sidney devotes more of his survey of English literature to drama
than to poetry. He possessed an instinctive sense of dramatic structure, as The Lady of
May demonstrates. Readers since Thomas Nashe have been impressed by the dramatic
character of Astrophil and Stella, and the first version of Arcadia is divided into acts.
Yet although he offers here the first example of sustained dramatic criticism in
English, Sidney's discussion utterly fails to anticipate the maverick forms of English
theater that were to explode with such brilliance in the decade after his death. Except
for Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1561), the first English
tragedy in blank verse, which he endorses with qualifications, and the tragedies of his
friend George Buchanan, Sidney dismisses the rest of English drama he has seen as
"observing rules neither of honest civility nor skillful poetry." He criticizes English
playwrights for failing to observe the rigid program of unities (time, place, and
action), a prescription generally attributed to Aristotle, and he praises ancient
exemplars such as Terence (Eunuchus), Plautus (Captivi and Amphitruo), and
Euripides (Hecuba).

Though he has claimed to see no harm in mixed poetic genres per se, he is especially
harsh in his comments on English tragicomedy, which, he remarks, is guilty of
promiscuously "mingling kings and clowns" and "hornpipes and funerals." English
comedy also fails to make the necessary distinction between delight and laughter, a
distinction he develops in considerable detail. He concludes that he has spent too
much time on plays because "they are excelling parts of poesy" and because "none
[other poetry is] so much used in England, and none can be more pitifully abused."

Just before his peroration Sidney returns to the subject of lyric poetry, "songs and
sonnets," which poets should direct toward the Platonic end of "singing the praises of
immortal beauty: the immortal goodness of that God who giveth us hands to write and
wits to conceive." In a passage rife with implications for Astrophil and Stella , he
complains of the wooden language of so many love poets who, "if I were a mistress,
would never persuade me they were in love." He attacks pseudo-Ciceronianism at
some length, allowing himself to stray "from poetry to oratory." But he finally excuses
the slip because it allows him to include penultimately a tribute to the ease, grace, and
beauty of the English language, which "for the uttering sweetly and properly [of] the
conceits of the mind ... hath not its equal with any other tongue in the world."

Apparently Sidney was serious in his private, concurrent hopes of introducing a

quantitative metrics into English poetry, for he writes that of the two methods of
versifying, by quantity and stress, "the English, before any vulgar language I know, is
fit for both." Of other poetic qualities loosely grouped under the heading of rhyme, he
argues that English is superior to other modern languages in its use of the caesura and
in its ability to rhyme with masculine, feminine, and medial formations.

The brilliant peroration to The Defence of Poetry is a masterly composite of summary,

exhortation, and admonition. Every praiseworthy poem is full of "virtue-breeding
delightfulness" and possesses all traits of learning; the charges against it are "false or
feeble," and bad poetry is produced by "poet-apes, not poets." The English language is
"most fit to honor poesy, and to be honored by poesy." Then, in the name of the Nine
Muses, Sidney enjoins the reader of his "ink-wasting toy" to believe with Aristotle
that poets were the keepers of the Greek divinities; with Pietro Bembo that poets first
brought civility to mankind; with Joseph Justus Scaliger that poetry will sooner make
an honest man than philosophy; with the German Conrad Clauser that in fables poets
communicated "all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy natural and moral, and quid
non"; with Sidney himself "that there are many mysteries contained in poetry, which
of purpose were written darkly"; and with Cristoforo Landino that poets are so loved
by the gods that "whatsoever they write proceeds of a divine fury." Alluding wryly to
the often fulsome tone of dedications and patron-seeking prefaces, he reminds
potential defenders of poetry that poets will make them "immortal by their verses,"
that their names "shall flourish in the printers' shops," and that poets shall make
laymen "most fair, most rich, most wise," so that their souls shall dwell with Dante's
Beatrice and Virgil's Anchises.

His concluding admonition, directed to anyone who might have "so earth-creeping a
mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry," is a masterpiece of tone,
combining the witty with the deadly serious for an audience that knew both the
triviality of much fashionable rhetoric and the crucial role of literature and language
in resisting the monument-destroying power of mutability and relentless time. As for
those who refuse to value poetry, in the name of all poets Sidney offers the
malediction that "while you live, [may] you live in love, and never get favor for
lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want
of an epitaph."

The Defence of Poetry emerges today, in the hindsight of literary history, as a fulcrum

in Sidney's career, gathering, organizing, and clarifying the critical energies developed
in his early work (such as The Lady of May and the experiments in quantitative verse)
and discharging these energies into the mature creations of the 1580s, Astrophil and
Stella and the revised Arcadia . Sidney's attractiveness as a critic, like that of John
Dryden in a later age, derives partly from his authority as a practicing poet who
speaks as much from experience with what works and what does not as from
familiarity with abstract notions of art. This is not to say, however, that his later works
simply actualize conceptual blueprints from The Defence of Poetry.