About the author

Philip Sidney (1554–86) was the nephew of Robert Dudley – Elizabeth I's favourite – who groomed him for the court. His talents and breeding yielded, however, no preferment, but his literary influence on England was unparalleled, when, after his legendary battlefield-death, he became immortalised as the ideal Elizabethan knight and gentleman.

About the text

The Defence of Poesy, probably composed throughout 1581 and 1582, presents an overview of the nature and functions of literature in addition to an assessment of England's talent pool. It was written partly in response to Stephen Gosson's The School of Abuse (1579), which, dedicated to Sidney, attacked poetry on moral grounds. Distancing himself from the puritanical Gosson, Sidney deploys the seven-part judicial oration of Ciceronian rhetoric to defend poetry from its detractors’ arguments. The tight formal structure suggests that poetry, unfairly incriminated in the court of public opinion, deserves justice worthy of Republican Rome.

The arts of memory

Prominent in The Defence's argumentation is the educational force of the poetic image, the delightful memorability of which trumps the philosophical precept and the historical example. The excerpt below examines another dimension of poetry's capacity to impress itself upon minds, occurring before he addresses the four main objections to poetry. It mobilises the argument that verse through rhyme and metre is more effective than prose in helping the reader learn a text by heart. Sidney adapts to poetry the commonplace that writing resembles an art of memory in that stanzas function as loci and rhythmical and rhymed words as securely placed images.

Textual notes

Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London, 1595), F3v–F4r.

The Defence of Poesy

But lay aside the just praise it hath, by being the only fit speech for music (music I say the most divine striker of the senses), thus much is undoubtedly true, that if reading be foolish without remembering, memory being the only treasure of knowledge, those words which are fittest for memory are likewise most convenient for knowledge. Now that verse far exceedeth prose, in the knitting up of the memory, the reason is manifest, the words (besides their delight, which hath a great affinity to memory) being so set as one cannot be lost, but the whole work fail: which accusing itself, calleth the remembrance back to itself, and so most strongly confirmeth it.