The Defences of Poetry part six: consequences B, some modern examples

Does any of this really matter? Who cares what some disappointed aristocrat wrote to soothe his sense of career failure or some towering egotist wrote to massage his own enormous sense of self-importance while living the high life in Italy?

Yes it does matter. We should care. To quote Pierre Bourdieu:

In an artistic field which has reached an advanced stage of its history, there is no place for naïf’s: more precisely, the history is immanent in the functioning of the field, and to meet the object demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to possess the whole history of the field.

There is far too much historical amnesia in the current discourse about poetry

Or to put it another way, the whole house of cards that constitutes the field of modern poetry: the way we talk about poetry, its obligatory use in schools when the majority of any population, including the people teaching it, don’t read it for pleasure, the way it is treated in University writing programs, the claims made by governing bodies, the fact we have governing bodies,  attitudes towards publication and reception,  rests on these works, and the way they have been recirculated in a sealed acoustic where the phrase “where is your evidence?” has been treated as a sign of unbearable naivety by those guilty of a much more fundamental naivety.

So before going on to Pound and Eliot 

1) The modern world; some scattered observations

In what follows I want to briefly look at some contemporary examples.  This is not meant to be exhaustive, just an illustration,  and space does not allow a detailed analysis of each example.  I’ve already mentioned a couple of posts back about the 2013 “A Poet, Cheating for money?” scandal, the bizarre things  and in previous posts about the way we talk about Poetry in the way we talk about no other art.

Examples can be easily found in any contemporary discussion or use of poetry but Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities(2005),  and Terry Eagelton’s How to Read a Poem (2007)  will serve as one example.   Both take for granted Sidney’s argument about the power of Poetry. 

According to Dawson the purpose of modern creative writing courses should be to turn out “literary Intellectuals” who will be “oppositional critics”. Oppositional criticism being:  textual or cultural critique of received opinions, with the ultimate aim of affecting social change , or at least an alteration of public opinion , beyond the refinements of disciplinary knowledge (p.201).  This is an extension and variation  on the romantic ideal of the outsider artist, given its most famous poetic expression in Shelley’s Defence. The claims for Poetry as an active participant in contemporary political processes, able to affect the community at large, flounder when one tries to see how this could operate outside the seminar room or find an example.

Analysing the ideology of poems written in the past, Terry Eagleton’s preferred method (Eagleton 2007), or discussing the ideology of poems written in the work shop (Dawson)  assumes poetry has inherent power over the reader which apprentice poets need to learn to use in appropriate ways (for which read, ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Dawson) and readers need to learn how to resist (but only what and in ways approved by the resident lecturer) (Eagleton).

This is based on the equally traditional belief that poetry “delights and instructs”, an idea that goes back in English to Sidney but beyond him to Horace. Such an approach reduces poetry to a carrier of ideological viruses  and poems to content,  just as the reviewers of the late nineteenth century judged a poet for “what he [sic] said”.  

However, at no stage can either Dawson or Eagleton, or anyone else, show how studying poetry this way prepares the student to do anything other than study poetry in this way. When put blandly: Poetry is the art of using words charged to their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders  lose the skill to shape, appreciate and understand the power of language will become slaves to those who retain it-be they politicians, preachers, copywriters or news casters  (Gioia 1992) can seem  baffling in its casual arrogance.  

Who are these self-appointed “intellectual leaders”. Gioia’s title Can Poetry Matter  is a Koan like encapsulation of the problem. It assumes “Poetry” means the same thing to everyone, and that it can and should “matter” to everyone, in the same way for the same reasons.

Even when the writer seems to be distancing herself from previous claims, she can be  trapped into recycling them. In an article published in the English Guardian in 2006 Adrienne Rich began by quoting Shelley’s famous statement and then qualified what she was discussing.

I hope never to idealise poetry - it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.

But by the end of the article, which is only 995 words long,  she has forgotten this and is writing about “Poetry’ as if it were all the things she has just claimed it is not:

Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented (Rich 2006).

My final brief example is from outside academic discussions. In the 21st Century, despite its miniscule share of the book market, (last year Britons apparently spent more on Pringles Chips than poetry books) despite the invisibility of poets for the majority of the population, Poetry rather than poets or poems, still has a privileged cultural position. 

In 2009 the British based poetry publisher Salt was in financial difficulties. Faced with impending bankruptcy it launched an appeal called “Save Our Salt”. [1]   Salt claimed that unless X number of books were sold in a limited time, it would be finished.  Word spread around the blogosphere, news outlets picked up the story, Salt sold its required number of books and the crisis was temporarily averted. 

At the time it seemed like a small but interesting example of the strange position poetry occupies in modern culture. It was difficult to imagine General Motors Holden for example,  during one of its regular financial crisis, appealing to the American consumer in a similar manner.  “We are going broke because you don’t want our product. Please buy the product you don’t want so we can continue to make the make the product you don’t want.”

In 2010, faced inevitably with the same problem, Salt relaunched their campaign with the following statement from Griff Rhys-Jones on the website:

Support the good work here. Don’t let Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we do not have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t? It’s a great list. And apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for studious folk like us. [2]

For many British communities the devastating social, economic and cultural effects of the closure of major industrial operations like ‘Motor Manufacturers’   are too familiar.  Why these might be lesser than the disappearance of  a small poetry publisher raises questions, not just about the values of “studious folks like us”,  but about their attitudes to poetry.  Referring to an idealised Poetry,  Jones cannot explain how poetry will help the economy in many subtle ways. Nor can he help but reveal the clubby sense that “bookish folk like us” feel they are rather superior to the masses who rely on motor manufacturers and fast food restaurants.

So this tracking of the defences is not “history” in the sense of something past and finished: whether or not Poets were prophets in the early stages of an unspecified culture is of academic interest in the derogatory sense of that term. Barbers were, until recently, surgeons,  but nobody goes to one today for open heart surgery.  This is a history, in Bourdieu’s terms which is immanent in the functioning of the field.  How individual writers or teachers situate themselves depends to a large extent on which versions of Poetry and Poet their craft is based on.  To use another Bourdieu quote;

This is why…it is so important if one is to have a bit of freedom from the constraints of the field, to attempt to explore the limits of the theoretical box in which one is imprisoned.

And so onwards to Pound and Eliot.

CE: As with all these posts, you are welcome to use them as long as you acknowledge your source. Referencing has been removed as a small anti-plagiarism device. If you contact me through the comments I'll happily supply them.

---

[1] See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/27/poetry-salt-publishing

http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/2009/05/save-salt-publishing-one-book-at-time.html

 http://www.thebookseller.com/news/salt-just-one-book-campaign-staves-closure.html

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/salts-campaign-funds-eroded-bad-autumn-sales.html

[2] http://www.saltpublishing.com/justonebook/

The Defences of Poetry. Part two, Sidney's context

Pat two...Sidney's context. (for the Defence see part one)

Sidney therefore begins the tradition of defending poetry in English by separating Art from Artefact and ignoring the artificer.  The real value of Poetry lies in what it can do, not what it is. The evidence for this is always somewhere else and in some distant past.  A disappointed man with no real power consoles himself by elevating his pastime and in doing so claims to be more powerful than those who have excluded him.

This description could be applied to almost every defence written since, by Shelley, Pound, Eliot, Gioia..et al.

So you could cherry pick the defence for fine sounding phrases about what this abstraction called “Poetry” does in the fantasy space of a solitary writing.  Or you could stop and consider this piece of writing as a specific move made by a specific biographical subject in response to contemporary issues.

Anyone who knows Sidney as a poet in the modern sense,  and today that means some acquaintance with Aristophil and Stella  would realise that Sidney has both included himself in the ranks of poets, and excluded his own work from his definitions of Poetry.  

Helgerson describes the poets of Sidney’s generation: Unable to ignore the suspicion that poetry was morally harmful and equally unwilling to forgo it, [they] had to prove again and again that it might be made beneficial. They were thus forced to argue that their work, rightly understood, warns against the every wantonness it portrays, but such arguments only involved them in a maze of self contradiction, revealing their dilemma, the dilemma of their generation-without resolving it (Helgerson p5). It’s not only a dilemma for them, but for some modern critics.  Although dating the writing of the Defence is difficult, most critics put it before the composition of Aristophil and Stella.

 If we read as human beings we can accept that texts are produced by human beings, who are inconsistent and can change their minds. It is possible that Sidney believed passionately in the arguments he advanced in the Defence and encountered the limitations of his own theory in the dazzling form of Penelope Devreaux.  Other critics have tried to reconcile the apparent discrepancy.  However, to say that Aristophil and Stella is not a biographical record, but a courtly game played in private between Sidney and Lady Rich (Duncan Jones) or an inverted lesson (Dutton et al) is merely to say that  Aristophil and Stella can be read in different ways; to argue that Sidney never meant it to be taken seriously is to dabble in the writer’s unavailable intentions. Whatever the reading,  it seems difficult to reconcile a poem about thwarted adulterous passion which was not circulated in Sidney’s lifetime,  with his claims for the public, moral educational effects of poesy.

Why then, does the defence operate the way it does? We might also ask why poetry needed to be defended?  There are three  broad answers: the first is the state of English poetry when Sidney was writing, the second lies in a range of pressures created by the social and cultural milieu he inhabited and the third is biographical[1].  

To a modern English reader there is another, hidden question:  Why  did he write in English at all.  English writers had known since the early Middle ages that if they wrote in Latin, their potential audience stretched from Cork to Constantinople. Even by Sidney’s time writing in English restricted the potential audience to the literate members of a ruling class in a small island floating, geographically, culturally and intellectually on the periphery of Europe.  Sidney was fluent in Latin, French and Italian.  After his tour of Europe and his diplomatic mission he had a circle of correspondents that stretched across Europe, none of whom seem to have known English. By writing the Defence in English,  he was making his claims for poesy in a language the people he was arguing into the second rank: Philosophers and Historians, could not respond to nor read.  Interesting way of winning an argument.

Poetry in English

The distinctive feature of Sidney’s defence is that poetry in English needed a champion. Looking backwards, Sidney could see Chacer and little else. The fifteenth Century is a famously dead time in English Poetry.  Tottel’s Miscelancy, perhaps the first published anthology of English poetry, had been  printed in 1557, but there  is a defensive tone in the address of the Printer to the Reader:  

That to haue wel written in verse;yea & in small parcelles, deserueth great praise, the workes of diuers Latines, Italians and other doe proue sufficiently. That our tong is able in that kynde to do as praiseworthy as ye rest, the honourable stile of the noble earl of Surrey, and the wieghtinesse of the depewitted Thomas wyat the elders verse, with suerall graces in sundry good Englishe writers, doe show abundantly. (This quote from the excellent Shearsman Edition.)

To argue that English poetry could be as valid as its classical or European counterparts required more than faith.  The Humanist education of the time elevated classical models and at the same time Italy was seen as the centre of poetic eloquence.   Blinded by the success of the later Elizabethans we tend to forget how barren the early years of Elizabeth’s court were for poetry.

When Helgerson was writing in the late 1970s critics had accepted the idea of an ”anxiety of Influence”, but as he  pointed out, it was more difficult to imagine the anxiety of those faced with no influences which they could follow, let alone fight against.  Even the standard history of 16^th poetry which sees Wyatt and Surrey developing the English lyric, to be followed by Sidney and Spenser who between them put poetry on a sure footing, ignores the fact that   what was later hailed as the dawn of  English renaissance lyricism in the works of Wyatt and Surrey found no immediate revival under Elizabeth because her courtiers did not recognise it as a compelling precedent. Courtliness was largely to be devised anew and tailored to the new regime without well-defined models and, at first, without a vibrant or conspicuous role for poetry (May 41). While we may think of the Petrachian lyric as “courtly poetry”, This kind of verse, however, almost disappeared from English poetry and above all from that written by courtiers between about 1547 and 1570 (May 41). In the retrospective time scale of centuries that constitutes the History of English poetry 23 years is not much, but Sidney only lived for 32.  Before 1570 poetry at the Elizabethan court, as defined and catalogued by May, consisted of Humanist verse, mostly in Latin, usually addressed privately to friends upon notable occasions , commendatory verses before published books and eulogies (43).  While Sidney wrote verse for court spectacles, it is almost consciously ephemeral and reading it is a slog.

Even the success of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calender, which the latter had dedicated to Sidney, and which is sometimes taken as the start of the English poetic renaissance was initially of dubious value as Sidney’s ambiguous discussion of it suggests.  Sidney idealised poetry as a possibility because the reality of it was that neither he nor his friends were composing the kind of poems which the Defence applauds.  Other courtiers, like Ralegh, were using poetry for display and self-advancement in ways alien to Sidney’s claims. 

Cultural and historical.

But if this explains that English poetry needed a defence, it doesn’t answer the question why poetry needed to be defended in terms of what it could do.

In Sidney’s case a number of answers are possible.  For Matz (2000, page 60), Sydney’s championing of Horatian ‘profit and pleasure’ can be read with reference to contemporary, politically charged debates, over aristocratic leisure.

For Helgerson and Pask,  Sidney’s work exhibits the anxiety of trying to reconcile the serious production of poetry with the contemporary ‘Aristocratic Life Narrative’ that consigned poetry, and love, to the frivolous times of youth with the added complication that in a society so conscious of rank and duty as his, Sidney was forced to explain how what he claimed was an aristocratic activity could also be pursued successfully by the non-aristocratic.

Kevin Pask (1996), Richard Helgerson (1976) and Katherine Duncan-Jones  argue that  something more than poetry was at stake in these arguments over poetry. The idealised  biographical progression of the aristocratic male, what Pask (54 ff) calls ‘life narratives’,  encoded the development of childhood , youth and adulthood. Youth was a period tinged with effeminacy until it was replaced by the qualities appropriate to manhood, ‘and was therefore a stage of indeterminate length in the Renaissance’(54). ‘Poetry for instance, emerged in aristocratic life narratives as the avocation of youthful courtship and thus courtiership, provided of course that it was superseded by the qualities of manhood’ (p54).  The life of the poet was thus a narrative of youthful prodigality. The failure to convert youthful poetry into conquest or high administrative office produced a life considered fundamentally unnarratable. The early construction of Sidney’s life narrative with that of aristocratic hero ruled out the association of his poetry with his manhood (p54).  Helgerson claims this progression is clear not only in the way lives were originally narrated (Pask’s study) but in the careers of Sidney’s generation. (Helgerson P7/8.) Spenser alone does not seem to have followed this pattern.

For Sidney then,  what is possibly at stake is his own identity as a man and his own sense of his duty.  Was it possible for an Aristocratic adult male to take poetry seriously? Is poetry even a fit activity for a man who should be actively serving his prince?  I think it is difficult for a modern English reader, living in Australia, or England or America to understand how hierarchical Elizabethan society was or how seriously the idea of duty could be imposed on sons by fathers. Sidney had spent his life trying to please elder men: his father, his uncles, men like Languet,  who were happy to tell him how to behave, or trot him out to dazzle, or ask him to compose a letter objecting to the queen’s marriage, but who never seemed to be able to give him the role or the income such ability might logically deserve.   This was a society where rank mattered; where the law defined what colours you wore or what type of food you could serve your guests depending on your income.  Sidney himself had been reminded, having argued over the use of a tennis court, that he was but a commoner and the man he was arguing with was the seventeenth de Veere of that title.

For most of his life Phillip had no opportunity to serve his prince or his country. His  diplomatic carrier was brief, restricted to one major embassy. His knighthood was almost an accident, his great hopes of the Dudley fortunes dashed, his debts so great his father in law had to bail him out and let the newly weds live in his own house. (dj 227))  It is therefore possible for Pask to claim “that the defense (sic) produces an imagined resolution of his Ill- defined position within the framework of an aristocratic state”. He has slipped into the role of poet,  and now, in a sleight of rhetorical hand, he elevated himself from an outsider denied influence or prestige to someone who is in the position of judge.

But this stance exists only in the space of the text. Sidney cannot prove that Poems do the things he claims they do, that Poetry is necessary to the aristocrat, nor can he substantiate his position as judge.  He can only claim it by right of his title as poet which is conferred on him for poems his own defence excludes.   For all his attempts to prove poetry is at home in the camps there is no argument that military prowess depends on poetry, merely the negative argument that poetry does not compromise military prowess.  And if Poetry is the aristocrat’s vocation, then there is the troubling fact that “Base servile men with servile wits” practise this art as well and are ‘rewarded of the printer”.

Biography

Duncan Jones also reads the defence from a biographer’s perspective.   The audience and circulation of the defence seems to have been severely restricted in his own life time. She believed that the intended audience was his future father in law: Walsingham need not worry about his head being too full of poetic fancies for him to be a worthy successor to a vital post like his own First Secretaryship.   (Dj 233). Woudhysen however, believes that his father law would not have been a part of the restricted circle, and the fact that the defence only exists in two manuscript copies, one that may never have left Penshurst, suggests its restricted circulation. 

The biographical irony, which Sidney shares with Pound and Eliot, is that they all did expand the possibilities of poetry in English.  Sidney did far more for it than he did for the Elizabethan state. However, as May (100ff) points out, it is not the  defence or the claims it contained which did this. It was the poetry he wrote and the model his life provided for later writers:  “Above all he dignified poetry as a respectable aristocratic pastime. The accessibility of Sidney’s works, coupled with his position as a model courtier and national hero, gave maximum impetus to a new and positive recognition of poetry as worthwhile art form. At the same time, he had created in Astrophil and Stella [May claims it’s the first English sonnet sequence but Spiller contests this) an intensely personal work devoid of any external or over riding moral purpose.”

But the Defence had set a precedent.

The reality of poems had been replaced with a discussion of an abstraction called Poesy. Poesy, later Poetry,  wasn’t the sum total of all the poems ever written. Few poems could live up to those claims and even fewer could be used as evidence to support them.  The role of the Imaginary Poet had begun to exceed expertise in the arrangement of vowels and consonants and become just as abstracted and unreal. It wasn’t until the 19^th century though that the implications of those two separations were driven not so much over the top and down the other side, but all the way to the world’s end,  which leads by way of a digression, to Shelley.  

Caveat Emptor....Should you wish to use any of this you are welcome as long as you acknowledge your source: however, please be aware the references are deliberately erratic to the point where that should sabotage any attempts at plagiarism.  Should you wish to use any of this, please use the comment bank to contact me and I will be happy to provide the proper references.   

---

[1] the tripartite division here is obviously clumsy. 

The Defences of Poetry Part One, Sidney

An Apology for Poetry/The Defence of Poetry (1595).  Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Part one: A Brief Summary

Sidney's Essay was not published in his own life time. A discussion of context will appear in part two.

As with Shelley and Pound, we can see Foucault’s 'Author Function' at work. Sidney’s defence is validated, not by the poetry he wrote, which in many ways contradicts it, but by the myth of his life that was generated soon after his early death. Regarded as the epitome of the Courtier, the learned renaissance hyphenated man, patron of learning, writer of poems, man of action. The myth validates the Defence. As a piece of writing it's more coherrent than others, but this is not an essay that's gone through a review/editing process.  

Firstly the defence is a defence of imaginative literature. Sydney follows Aristotle in insisting that because  ‘poesy’,  and poetry,  come from the Greek word for ’making’, 'poesy' signifies the making of fictions, and not the use of verse. For Sidney, Poesy will be defended in terms of what it can do. Its effect, not its nature, is what is at stake.

Poesy is superior to other intellectual pursuits because the historian can only say what happened, the philosopher may well know what is good but will teach it in a way that is off putting.  Only poetry by its ability to delight and present ideal and admirable version of the world can offer instruction in a way that will be amenable to all men. According to Sidney,  there are three types of poesy. 

The first is created by the religious poets: psalm writers for example; the second philosophical and moral and the third “indeed right poets” for these third be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been or shall be, but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.(p11)

Sidney distinguishes between the first sort, which he calls ‘Vates’, and the third sort, ‘Poets’. For these indeed do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach, and delight men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger (11).

The third sort can  be subdivided into heroic, lyric, tragic, comic etcec but he makes an important distinction: ..verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poet. (11) Sidney obviously felt the need to reiterate the point: When he comes to consider objections to his claims, he makes the following distinction. ”But that which giveth greatest scope to their [the poet haters] scorning humour  is rhyming and versing. It is already said (and as I think truly said) it is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy; one may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry.) (32) at the same time he explicitly defended verse: “So that verse being itself sweet and orderly, and being best for memory, the only handle of knowledge it must be in jest that any man can speak against it” 33

Writing a poem, does not make you a poet. Nor does writing verse mean you’re writing poetry.  This is the first of the distinctions which will continue to be made up until the present.

What underlines the value of poetry, rather than mere verse, lies in its functional ability to instruct; to teach men moral goodness by representing what can be. At the same time poetry is not effeminate or feminising (which may have had particular relevance to Sindey because he had written his first major piece of Poesy, the 'old‘ Arcadia at the request of his sister for her and for her small circle of female friends, at her request.  Opponents of poetry claim that before poets ‘were in price’, ‘our nation had set their hearts delight upon action and not imagination, rather than doing things worthy to be written than writing things fit to be done”  (36)  To which Sidney categorically states; For as poetry itself, it is the freest from this objection, for poetry is the companion of the camps. 

This idealised version of poetry naturally elevates the poet who has all from Dante’s heaven to his Hell under the authority of his pen (p20). The problem which by now is nagging at Sidney’s reader is one he has obviously considered because he pre-empts the obvious objection: Which if I be asked what poets have done so. As I might well name some, so yet say I, and say again, I speak of the art and not of the artificer. (p20) He returns to the point later, when considering objections to his claims that poetry is the superior art: First that there being many more fruitful knowledges, a man might better spend his time in them than in this. Secondly, that it is the mother of lies. Thirdly that it is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a siren’s sweetness drawing the mind to the serpent tail of sinful fancies and herein especially comedies give the largest field to ear as Chaucer saith (33) His response to the third objection is that … grant I say, whatsoever they will have granted, that not only love but lust, but vanity, but-if they list-scurrility possesseth many leaves of the poets’ books; yet think I, when this is granted, they will find their sentence may with good manners put the last words foremost, and not say that poety abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry (36).  Shelley will make the same argument, in almost exactly the same cadence (grant that Homer was a drunkard, Dante a coward, Spenser a poet laureate) but will drift off the point to claim that great poets can’t be evil men.

On the one hand this strategy of discussing the art not the artificer and refusing to give specific examples allows Sidney to make his claims for the art without having to deal with every exception.   On the other hand it means he can never substantiate his claims except in rhetorical terms which makes it very difficult for a reader to stop and consider the truth of what he’s saying. How seriously Sidney took his own defence is difficult to judge. It begins with an anecdote which warns the reader against theories.  At the end he writes  I conjure you all that had the evil look to read this inwasting toy of mine…  This could well be the Aristocrat’s dismissal of effort, Castiglione’s sprezzatura, but at the same time when Sidney was dying, it is reported that he wanted his writings burnt. Even before that he had turned from writing poesy to translating psalms and then seems to have stopped writing all together.

With the exception of the doubt expressed in the last three sentences, such a reading of Sidney’s essay is conventional:  I have outlined his argument.  Traditionally it might lead to a statement like J.A.Van Dorsten’s, in his introduction to his 1966 OUP Edition of the Defence: : “Sidney’s treatise illustrates how an Elizabethan could look  at literature.” Or more enthusiastically: ’The poet’s task therefore though called ‘imitation’, is not to represent this world as it is seen by our imperfect eyes but to figure forth a ‘nature” of a higher order, re-creating in his imaginative mind the world as it may have existed in the creator’s mind”(12). We are imperfect, but the Poet has a task which requires him(sic) to be Godlike.  We will meet this semi-divine character in the effusions of Shelley, Emerson and Pound. 

As Van Dorsten continues: “this doctrine, ambitious and humble at the same time, is not only crucial to an understanding of Sidney’s life and writings, but also indicates how poetry could cease to be regarded as a mere rhetorical art. In the Defence the limitless scope of poetry was defined in terms such as no English man had ventured to use before.”  Leaving aside any quarrel  with that “ambitious and humble”  or  ‘limitless scope”, we might ask why it had been defined in such terms? Anyone who knows Sidney the poet, and today that probably means some acquaintance with the sonnet sequence Aristophil and Stella on which his poetic reputation could be said to rest, would realise, reading the defence, that Sidney has both included himself in the ranks of poets, and excluded his own work from his definitions of poetry.  

However such a simple outlining of the argument fails to take into account why he felt Poesy needed to be defended, and the particular historical, biographical, and cultural moment he was responding to.

Which will follow.

(A note on quotes and references. A small anti plagiarism move.  If you read this and want to use it you may, as long as you acknowledge sources: but be aware that page references are to specific editions, and one or two quotes are deliberately left in need of checking.  If you do want to use any of this, then leave a comment and I will provide the references.) 

The Defence of Poetry: Part one...Introduction

 A short and perhaps erratic tour of the Defences of Poetry,  from Sidney to the present day. In numerous installments appearing at irregular intervals. 

The Prologue: 

In an artistic field which has reached an advanced stage of its history, there is no place for naïf’s: more precisely, the history is immanent in the functioning of the field, and to meet the object demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to possess the whole history of the field. (Bourdieu 56/57)

The recirculated  assumptions that underwrite modern discussions of Poetry, most recently in David Constantine’s Poetry (Oxford. 2013) can be traced back in English at least as far as Sir Phillip Sidney (1554-1586), whose Defence of Poesy (Or An Apology for Poetry) is one of the first English attempts to make a case for poetry in English.

Sidney consciously and explicitly idealised the art and split it from both artifact and artificer. For the next four hundred years writers including Shelly, Emerson, Pound, T.S Eliot,  Dana Gioia, and David Constantine would make similar claims for the effects of an idealised art which had little empirical justification. Part of their rhetorical strategy would be to recirculate previous claims without ever stopping to evaluate their truth.

The literary historian or the biographical critic might study the Defence as contemporary evidence of attitudes to poetry, or as the thinking of a particular Biographical subject. There are articles on Sidney’s use of Aristotle; his understanding of Aristotle; the rhetorical structures of the Defence; how the “meaning” in the defence is qualified by the rhetorical structures; the contradictions in the argument; the literary and intellectual sources of the defence., The theorist might contextualise the arguments to see how it negotiates the cultural discourse in circulation at the time.

But reading as a writer, I want to know if what Sidney said was factually true. Given the fact that these defences often avoid giving evidence for their claims, that in Sidney and Shelley’s case their history is a blend of wishful thinking and an apparent inability to distinguish between history myth and legend,  the question that is rarely investigated in the university setting: “was he right?”, is the one I want answered. Could I base my practice on their claims for the art I wish to produce?

“Poetry’ is possibly one of the oldest of art forms.  Rhythmically organised language appears in every culture in every period of history.  As numerous commentators have pointed out, anyone who takes the writing of poetry seriously needs to know at least the tradition of poetry in his or her own language. Most who make the effort are aware that the obvious danger is to think that what qualified as “good poetry” in Chaucer’s time is the same as what gets published in the twenty first century, or that the label ‘poet’  had the same meaning and social connotations for Wyatt as it does for Cieran Carson or Les Murray. 

 However, Wyatt’s poems can still be read with profit and enjoyment by someone with no knowledge of the history or poetics of his time. Ironically, despite the academic trend over the past thirty years to insist on the importance of the context of the poem’s production, what does tend to be forgotten is that the Defences of poetry are always an individual’s move in a contemporary argument,  always historically local, always culturally contingent.

In Bordieu’s words:

Ignorance of everything that goes to make up the mood of the age produces a derealization of works: stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of their time ( I am thinking in particular of the connotations of words) they are impoverished and transformed in the direction of intellectualism or an empty humanism.(32)

Bourdieu goes on to claim that this is particularly true in the history of  ideas, and particularly in philosophy where there is a tendency to present philosophic activities as a “summit conference between great philosophers”(p32) This is even more true of the defences of poets. What tends to be forgotten is that 'poetry' is not the same thing for Shelly as it was Sidney or T.S. Eliot. When Pound and Eliot discuss 'Poetry' they are using the term in ways that we might recognise. We could find their ‘poetry’ in the poetry section of a book shop or a library. But the fact that we can read some of Sidney’s poems for enjoyment seduces us into thinking that Sidney’s definition of poetry is the same as ours. It wasn’t. Shelley’s  “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” is an often quoted piece of nonsense, but how many of those who quote it have either read the essay it appears in or know what Shelley meant by “poets” or ‘poetry’?  

 The two most famous of the defences, Sidney’s and Shelly’s, define poetry in ways that are radically different to contemporary usage. To examine the way their claims have been recirculated, it is first necessary to identify that. We shall be able to see that not only what Sidney was claiming for poetry but why he was making those particular claims, are the product of an interaction between social historical and literary forces.  And because Sidney is some ways the paradigm that the others follow, I will deal with him first and try and do it in some detail.