An Apology for Poetry – By Sir Philip Sidney

P - 348
Date - 1st December 2023

“Nature’s world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden” or
“Poetry improves upon reality”

 

S(caps)idney’s An Apology for Poetry is a true defence of poetry. The Puritans of his age attacked poetry on many accounts. Gosson wrote his document to show how evil poetry was; it was full of abuse. He quoted Plato as his authority and denounced poetry as something that weakened a nation, prompted lies and corrupted taste. But Sidney in his essay showed that poetry should be highly valued and while defending poetry against the charges of the Puritans, he makes the statement – “Her (nature’s) world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”

Sidney points out that poetry was the earliest form of composition in all countries. Such was the appeal of poetry in ancient times that the philosophers of Greece did not, for a long time, appear before the people as philosophers; they appeared before the people under the garb of poets. Even historians borrowed from poetry their style of writing history. Poetry has been holding the ground even in barbarous countries. The ancient Romans bestowed the divine title of ‘vates’ on poets, while the ancient Greeks regarded the poet as a maker.

The poet, like other men of learning, imitates the objects of nature. However, while other men of learning have to adhere to Nature, the poet goes beyond Nature. The poet is carried forward and upward by the vigour of his own invention and does, in fact, build up another Nature:

“Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up the vigour of his own invention, both growing in effect into another nature.”

The key idea in this statement is the replacement of the metaphor of the poem as imitation, “a mirror of nature”, by that of the poem of heterocosm, “a second nature”, created by the poet in an act analogous to God's creation of the world.

The poet either makes things better than those which exist in Nature or makes absolutely new forms such as did not exist before in Nature. The poet creates such new forms as demi-gods, Cyclops, Chimeras and Furies. The world, which the poet depicts in his work, is more beautiful than the existing world. He is a golden world as distinguished from the brazen world of Nature. The poet portrays human beings of the kind who never existed in Nature. Nature has never created “such a constant friend as Pylades, such a valiant man as Orlando, such a true prince as Cyrus, so excellent a man in every work as Aeneas." The Greeks, says Sidney, were fully justified in giving the poet the title of "Maber".

Indeed, the creative faculty is the highest quality with which man is blessed; and this creative faculty is found in the poet to a greater extent than in any other kind of man. Thus, Sidney does not regard poetic imitation as something slavish. The poet’s imitation of Nature is not a servile imitation. His imitation of nature is not a tame copy of what is to be seen and found in this world. The poet rises above this world of reality. As Sidney puts it, the poet “transcends” Nature. Flowers smell sweeter in the works of the poets than they do in real gardens. Salinger wrote “the poet represents another nature and in so doing makes himself, as it were another God”. The creative aspect of poetry must be recognised; and Sidney did great service to literary criticism by recognising and emphasizing it.

Sidney’s main thesis, therefore, is that the real glory of poetry lies in the fact that it does not merely imitate but creates. He almost proceeds to develop a theory of “ideal imitatio” the notion that the poet imitates not the mere appearance of actuality but steps short of this to maintain the more naïve-theory that the poet creates a better world than the one we actually live in. He does not rest content with a mere escapist position. For Sidney, the ideal world of the poet is of value because it is both a better world than the real one and it is presented in such a way that the reader is stimulated to try and imitate it in his own practice. Thus, the Aristotelian notion of imitation is transferred from the poet to the reader. The poet does not imitate but creates: it is the reader who imitates what the poet creates.

Sidney’s method is that of logician; he examines poetry in whole and in parts, considers the points in favour and the points against, and then sets forth his main thesis that far from being despised it deserves ‘the laurel crown’. It is the oldest of all the branches of learning, ‘whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tough knowledge', being superior to philosophy by its charm, to history by its universality, to science by its moral end, to law by its encouragement of human rather than civic goodness. The poet alone can fashion a perfect lover, a perfect friend, and a perfectly valiant man, even though they are not found in Nature.