Why was poetry so frequently defended in the English Renaissance on the grounds of its “profitable pleasure,” its ability, as Philip Sidney perhaps most famously puts it, to “delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger”? The intent of Renaissance poetry to “profit and delight” restates classical doctrine, Horace's “aut prodesse … aut delectare” or Lucretius' metaphor for his instructional verse: wormwood daubed with honey. An intellectual historical account of the prevalence of this doctrine in the Renaissance would not explain, however, why the inheritors of this classical tradition suddenly recognized themselves as such and claimed their inheritance. The problem requires instead a social historical account if it is to avoid effacing the social and cultural contradictions that this Horatian poetics itself worked to efface in Renaissance England. Forwarding such an account, I argue that this Horatian poetics marks a struggle between dominant and subordinate members of the sixteenth-century elite. The construction of the very category of “literature” in Horatian terms, I will argue, was responsive to this struggle, which created a conflict over the value of labor or leisure, and an uncertainty about which activities constituted either. The intent of poetry to “profit and delight” would mask this conflict – strategically – within that “and.”