The Defences of poetry Part six: Shelley and his consequences (A)

The problem with Shelley’s ‘argument’ is not so much how daft it seems, or how modern understandings of history and language might invalidate so much of it, but its implications.  Succeeding generations were left with a tangle of contradictions, and while they would take issue with one or other, the basic ground, that the ability to arrange consonants and vowels into pleasing patterns was a guarantee of elite status,  even if no one read them, would remain undisturbed as poetry’s share of culture and market place shrank inexorably over the next two centuries. The danger of taking him seriously can be seen in Pound's Career. Of which more later.

The Tangle

If poetry is the highest form of human achievement  and poems, in the restricted sense, the highest form of poetry, and if Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight.(53) then obviously if poetry doesn’t delight you and you don’t see any wisdom mingled in it, you are at fault. You are not a “spirit”.  It’s not the fault of the poem or the poet.  Popularity is unwelcome, and elitist obscurity a badge of merit. "Spirits" did/and still do, look down their noses at the rest of creation. 

The reading of poetry, or at least the buying of poetry books, would become a mark of social and cultural distinction; proof of one’s education, sensitivity, and refinement. Proof you belonged to Mathew Arnold’s “Men of poetry and culture”. Literature entered the university curriculum at the start of the twentieth century piggy backing a ride on such assumptions and that shaped the way the subject was constructed. Of which more in the next post. 

If poets are the most sensitive of souls, then poems are going to have to be about sensitivity, and that leads to several dead ends: the kind of vapid (sensitive) poetry that Pound and Eliot rebelled against, the late 19^th century cult of the aesthete, the persistent popular idea that poetry is about 'expressing your deepest darkest feelings’ (As one student put it to me). By implication, and later by explicit statement, the idea that certain registers of language were unacceptable, certain subjects out of bounds, because they were beneath the sensitivity of the poet and the refinement of the readers. We are along way from the world of Chaucer’s poetry.

A long lasting practical part of the problem, if you take Shelley’s type of statements seriously, is how could anyone use his pronouncements as the basis of a craft.  If  'A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth' how can anyone set out to write one. If  Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.(p54) what can that possibly mean in terms of individual poems.  Sidney had argued for a moral purpose his own poems did not have.  Shelley claimed qualities for poems which no anthology could support.

If  A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.(53) then the poet is not a social being taking part in everyday life, but a self absorbed creature who is not understood by his peers but valued “they know not why”?   A set of behaviors for “a poet” is being mapped out, no matter how unrealistic or unrelated to the production of poems, and there would be numerous people who would take them at face value (see quotes from Emerson’s essay above).

Shelley’s essay, from the perspective of someone interested in the craft of writing poetry, creates two other problems. They are I think, the most damaging in terms of their long term effect.

They are based on contradictions in Shelley’s thinking: he believed, somehow, the poetry of Homer and Dante does not carry contemporary ideas, or promote their versions of right and wrong (pardon?).  He also seems to have believed that words like “truth” and “beauty” are not abstractions constantly being redefined, but are eternal absolutes that are understood by everyone, from Homer to Shelley, to mean the same thing. (At which point someone writes an essay on Shelley's debt to Plato but that doesn't exonerate him or make the argument any more solid.) 

The same is true for literary value. Shelley was creating, or at least verbalizing, a vacuous critical vocabulary that would be ready made for the unthinking use of later reviewers and blurb writers.   If  “beauty” is an  unchanging eternal value: “time” is an objective test of literary value.

The poet, in the restricted sense, is the greatest of human beings; the most refined, the most sensitive, his fame outlives even the great religious figures who are merely poets in the general sense. So in Shelley’s terms Dante is more famous than Jesus or the Buddha. However, the poet’s fame rests not on his standing with his contemporaries, but with posterity. And his fame relies, according to this, on his ability to escape the particular. 

Writing for posterity is a fool’s game. The poet is not going to be around to find out if he or she were right but more importantly in the twenty first century,  the idea that time is an impartial objective arbiter of value will not stand scrutiny. We know that literary value is a contingent, changing, culturally determined opinion. “The test of time” is not a test worth taking. The practical problem this raises is to make the particular and the contemporary seem out of the place in “Poetry”.

Related to this is an even more destructive paradox. The poet is the greatest of human beings, blessed with abilities to reveal eternal truths beyond that of any other mortal. But at the same time the poet, as we’ve seen, is solitary, sensitive, and his poetry is written not for his time but for later generations.  How then can the poet write great poetry that is directly involved with the issues of his or her time? How can he use poetry to advance this truth that only he can see?

 Shelley is adamant that he cannot and should not:  A poet would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time in his poetical creations, which participate in neither… There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.(55)

So  poets who wish to embody their perceptions of right and wrong  or who affect a political or moral aim, must accept that what they produce will not be poetry of the highest sort. Indeed, a poetry rooted in the now of writing, as we have seen explicitly with Emerson and spread throughout Shelley’s essay,  will condemn writer and poem to being dismissed because We hear through all the varied music, the ground tone of conventional life. Shelley’s  unacknowledged legislators can legislate nothing, cannot even participate actively in the here and now, if they want to write poetry. 

The poet, in the restricted sense, is therefore both greater than other men, but totally incapable of affecting or changing the course of his contemporary's lives through his poetry.  Nor is the poet the kind of man who will go amongst the industrial slums of 19^th century England looking for practical solutions to the problems facing the working poor. A role has been mapped, and despite its silliness, it would attract many willing takers. The poem as thing of beauty:  A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. would carry into the language of the popular reviews throughout the 19^th century, where, as Stead has shown, “beauty’ could be used as a critical standard to validate the most vapid of sentimental verse and castigate any poet who dared to try and include mundane specifics in his or her poem.  Enter Eliot and his rats....

The Defences of Poetry Part Five: Shelley Part one

To Peacock’s Four Ages, Shelly, then In Italy, decided to reply.  Peacock was a friend, and his satirical portrait of Shelley in Nightmare Abbey had not spoilt the friendship.  In fact Shelley had written to compliment him on it.

The Defence was written in 1821, but Shelley (who died in 1822) like Sidney, did not live to see his piece published.  

It’s worth pointing out several things:

1.  Unlike Sidney, Shelley was consciously writing polemic for publication.  The existing Defence, which has a tangled publication history, was conceived as part one of three. The other two parts were not written.   
2. The Defence is not a refereed essay in a modern journal: it is a relatively young man’s enthusiastic effusion.   Many of the high school students I teach are capable of writing more coherently. Submitted as the draft of an essay, it would be returned with numerous suggestions for tightening up the argument,  getting the facts rights and avoiding embarrassment. 
3.  It has numerous passages where the beauty of the prose is incontestable. (Unlike many refereed essays in modern journals?).  It is seductive, and it’s difficult to read it and not want to believe it. Critics have cherry picked it for phrases ignoring the arguments, sometimes oblivious to the vacuous beauty they were quoting. And that final sentence taken out of context, gets repeated with nauseating regularity. 
4.   In Defending Poetry, Shelley helped dig a hole for writers of poems which has proven almost impossible for succeeding generations to escape.

 So:

While Peacock had discussed what a modern audience would recognise as poetry, Shelley’s definition of ‘poetry’ and therefore ‘poet’ is even broader than Sidney’s.

According to Percy B there are two types of mental action: reason and imagination. For Shelley; Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance (p.49). Having made his first claim and effectively dismissed every other way of thinking, Shelley can then extends Sidney’s definition by stating that, Poetry, in a general sense may be defined to be “the expression of the imagination” (p.49) and therefore poetry in the general sense can be found in painting, sculpture, music, law, religion, anywhere there is evidence of the work of imagination. 

Having rendered Poetry as a category so general as to be practically useless, he does the same for Poets  who “in the most universal sense of the word” (p.51) are those who in whom the faculty of approximation to the beautiful exists in excess.  

  But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. 49

These poets are almost supernatural beings: A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not.(p50) but of them all the poet, in the restricted sense of the user of language, is the most superior. Shelley claims this springs from the nature of language itself. The sculptor or the musician must use materials that limit and interpose between conception and expression. Language on the other hand “has relation to thoughts alone”ref?.  Poets in the limited sense of users of language are justifiably more famous than any other type of poet in the general sense (p50).  The definitions reach a crescendo:

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. (p52)

Have established his definitions Shelley then turns to estimate the effects of poetry on society. Without poetry there would be no civilization. Poetry is not just an indicator of the values of civilisation,  but a cause of it. 

This loopy statement will be repeated by succeeding writers, from Pound, to Eliot to Dana Gioia. 

It's not always clear whether Shelley means poetry in the general or the restricted sense, but he claims: 

… it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed... The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself. 68

It’s in passages like this that one begins to wonder if Shelley were enjoying an in joke with Peacock. A skeptical reader might well ask exactly how Chaucer’s fart jokes or Lord Bacon’s essays altered the moral condition of the world or how the wheel or agriculture had been discovered and developed without Dante?

His history of the world is one man’s peculiar version, conscripted to support a highly idiosyncratic argument. He reminds me of Foucault, except Shelley writes better.  

Some of his history naturally reflects the state of knowledge when he was writing.  But even in his own day, labeling Dante as the first religious reformer, may have come as a surprise to those who knew about Saint Francis, St Dominic, Gregory the Great and St Augustine. His mother in law, had she been alive, would certainly have been surprised to discover women were free after the 11^th Century.

When he claims that: As to his [the poet’s] glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men(71) … and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.(73) It’s almost impossible to believe he’s not writing tongue in cheek. Even in his own small circle the first Mrs. Shelley would have challenged that statement, as would Peacock who was “pro Harriet”.  As would Lady Caroline Lamb,  Annabelle Milbank and Claire Claremont in terms of Byron’s treatment of them.

Why such claims about the poet and poetry became accepted and repeated, became in some ways articles of cultural faith during the 19^th century and still underwrite a great many discussions of poetry in the twenty first,  is an intriguing question which deserves a study on its own. 

You can see their residue in the recent scandal (2013) surrounding cheating in a high profile Australian poetry competition. Underwriting the shock horror response was the bizarre idea that although the news is full of cheating by sports people, by clubs, by politicians and business men; despite the fact that schools and Universities invest time and money and effort into preventing Plagiarism, the very idea that a "Poet" might cheat for a large pile of money was somehow shocking if not actually unimaginable. 

However, what is more to the point here is the paradox, or sets of paradox, which are given expression in Shelley’s essay and which create a trap for the writer and reader of poetry. I’m not suggesting that Shelley invented them, but his defence does give a clear view of them.

Which will be discussed in the next installment. 

CE: As with the other posts in this sequence,  proper referencing has been removed. You are welcome to use any of these posts as long as you acknowledge the source. The absence of proper references should make plagiarism difficult. Leave a request in the comments and I'll happily supply them. 

The Defences of Poetry part four. Peacock's 'The Four Ages of Poetry'

Shelley’s Defence was an explicit response to Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry. Which should be better known,  if only because the way it is treated reveals so much about Poetry World.

There are full texts of Peacock on line:

http://www.thomaslovepeacock.net/FourAges.html

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237842?page=1

The introduction to the Poetry Foundation’s version states: Peacock is unsparing in his literary critique, but also difficult to take seriously, given the wide swath and humorous tone of his criticism. As Peacock notes, “The marvellous too is very much like a snowball: it grows as it rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth which began its descent from the summit is hidden in the accumulation of superinduced hyperbole.”

Such an attitude is not uncommon. One should not rattle the cage. 

As one of Shelley’s modern editors wrote:  It’s not too much to say that but for Shelley’s Vigorous Defence Peacock’s essay would have been dead and forgotten long since. If it lives, it does so in the shade of Shelley’s inspired reply. For either from a literary or from a critical point of view Peacock’s essay is of little importance. 

Yet it’s difficult to see exactly what is hyperbolic about some of Peacock’s statements, or why his criticism is difficult to take seriously.   

One of Peacock’s editors can state:  To take it as a serious attack on poetry would be absurd (p.x).  However, Peacock did not write: That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men. Shelley did.  No one argues that Shelley’s is a comic masterpiece. 

We can see Foucault’s ‘Author Function’ at work here. Shelley’s Defence is a fantasy of bad history, dubious linguistics, self-aggrandisement  and outlandish claims which is only preserved because of who wrote it and because it allows a certain type of critic to go into raptures. If biographers thought Shelley had a sense of humour then the Defence would be regarded as a good joke in response to Peacock’s The Four Ages. 

Peacock is funny, and blunt, and his history is probably much more accurate than either Sidney’s or Shelley’s. In Peacock’s version there is nothing romantic or ethereal about the early days of poetry: The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king; his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.  This is the origin of poetry, which like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market” (Peacock p4). Such a history,  however,  sits uncomfortably with the refined and delicate souls who find Joy, Truth and Beauty wandering in Shelley’s effusions.  As one editor wrote,  and you should try saying this out loud: So if we are to believe Peacock, the first poet was nothing but a hireling and a drunken one! 

Poet’s drank and wanted to be paid? How shocking. The Gentleman may not have read the Anglo-Saxon poem,  Deor.

Peacock’s argument was that ‘Poetry’ had made a double movement: the traditional history of the ages: Gold, Silver Iron Brass altered: to Iron, Gold, Silver Brass, in the ancient world, with a second post dark age movement with the same progression, as Poetry in his own time was entering a lesser age as the best minds moved to other fields.

The conclusion to his long final paragraph sounds as true today as it was then, although some of the proper nouns he used need updating. The paragraph is far too long to quote but he identifies poetry’s shrinking audience as readers turn to other sources of writing for either entertainment or information, and he moves towards his  climax with:

  …intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rhymsters and their Olympic judges , the magazine critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicans, historians, politicians, and political economists  who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and, knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with which the drivellers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair.

Editors and critics may have dismissed Peacock,  but he’s probably closer to the reality of his time than they are, or Shelley was. While it’s easy to think of the Romantic Period as a time when everyone was crazy for poetry, a quick glance at the sales figures for books in that period is an essential context for Shelley.  Which is for the next post. And then Shelley.

 CE: As with the other posts in this sequence proper referencing has been removed. You are welcome to use any of these posts as long as you acknowledge the source. The absence of proper references should make plagiarism difficult. Leave a request in the comments and I'll happily supply them. 

The Defences of Poetry: Part three, an interlude

Between Sidney and Shelly much changes. Poetry in English develops a history and a roll call of famous names and achievements. 

After the Restoration, written poems move out of the court and into the market place. However, while Rochester may be the last courtier poet worth reading, writing poems remains the activity of those who do no not need to make a living from it.

More importantly, the idea which today we take for granted, that an individual subject can not only originate ideas but own the written expression of those ideas, becomes gradually established, a movement marked by the first Copy Right laws of 1709. It’s one of the great fault lines running though the history of English poetry. The anonymous Scop, Chaucer, whoever wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,  Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Pope are split from us not so much by their language and subject matter but by the idea of the poet as individual genius who has something to say that has never been said before. “Originality” rears it ugly head and the shrinkage towards the lyric is well under way.

During and after the “Romantic Period” , “Poet” became a title, a label of a perverse distinction, a role to inhabit, rather than the name of a practitioner of a craft. Given that poetry never had the majority share of the print market, and that with one or two startling exceptions, no one made a living from the sales of their poems,  “Poet” offered a choice between the lofty mountain top or the desperate garret. 

Iconographically, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog painted in 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich. presents one version of this role.

The figure, alone above the clouds, isolated, looking down on the World beneath was the visual representation of one version of the Romantic Poet just as Wordsworth standing on Westminster Bridge is a similar written one. The clearest literary expression of this is in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘The Poet’, printed in 1844 but given as a lecturer earlier than that.  The implications of Sidney’s idea that not all poets write poetry, and not all verse writing qualifies for the title of poet, is played in one paragraph which is worth quoting in full:

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and the causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet.  I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind whose head appeared to be a music box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether he was not only a lyricist but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man.  He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from a torrid base through all the climates of the globe with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear through all the varied music, the ground tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talent who sing, and not the children of music (p.81).  

As a job description, it is difficult to imagine there would be many applicants. What exactly does the first or last sentence mean in terms of a poem? However, the would be poet need not worry. “Poetry” is a verdict, and the verdict is out of the writer’s hands and in the Critic’s.

However, the Romantic ideal of the poet as solitary far seeing genius had its dark side. The iconographic representation of this is Henry Wallis’ painting of The Death of Chatterton.  Chatterton may be the first poet who was more famous for being famous than for his verse. Hazlitt certainly thought so. The modern biographer Richard Holmes speculated that he did not intentionally commit suicide but simply tried to medicate himself and got the dosage wrong.

Young, alone, poor, isolated by his genius which the outside world did not appreciate, the outsider-poet is destroyed by the indifference of the cruel world and takes his own life, his poems shredded in a last act of despair. It sounds Romantic in a way “Fraud dies due to faulty maths” doesn’t.   

As a pose it is tedious, or the prerogative these days of popular musicians strutting in a music industry driven by the need for marketable “attitude”, but when it was taken seriously, and surprisingly it was, it validated a set of assumptions about the genius writer and his (sic) relationship with his art and his audience. Which brings us to Shelley. Though Peacock, who is much more interesting,  first.

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.   

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[1] the tripartite division here is obviously clumsy.