Sir Philip Sydney: An Apology for Poesy

Prepared by: Marie Joy Anhaw

Jaypee Rogel Pacres

Early Life

Birthdate: November 30, 1554

Birthplace: Penshurst Place, Kent

Parents: Sir Henry Sidney

Lady Mary Dudley

Education: Shresbury School (secondary)

Christ Church, Oxford (college)

Politics

• defended his father's administration of Ireland in a lengthy document

• wrote a lengthy letter to the Queen detailing the foolishness of the French marriage

Literary Writings

• The Lady of May• Astrophel and Stella• The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia• A Defense of Poetry

Injury and Death

• Died on October 17, 1586

"Thy necessity is yet greater than mine"

Legacy

• A street in Zutphen, Ohio , was named after him

• A statue for him can be found in the park at the Coehoornsingel

A defense of Poesy (1595)_

The Renaissance

• The Renaissance was an era of changes.

• Intellectuals doubted values and beliefs from the ancient world and tried to find another way of thinking. 

Stephen Gosson

He is best known for his attack on plays, poetry, and other arts in The School of Abuse (1579), which evoked in reply a defense from Thomas Lodge and Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry.

Stephen Gosson makes charges on poetry which Sidney answers.The charges are:1. Poetry is the waste of time.2. Poetry is mother of lies.3. It is nurse of abuse.4. Plato had rightly banished the poets from his ideal world. 

1. Poetry is the source of knowledge and a civilizing force.

SIDNEYS’ DEFENSE

2. A poet does not lie because he never affirms that his fiction

is true and can never lie.

3. Sidney rejects that poetry is the source of abuses. To

him, it is people who abuses poetry, not the vice- versa.

4. Sidney views that Plato in his Republic wanted to banish the abuse of poetry not the poets.

References:

http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/criticaltheories/sir-philip-sydney.html  http://www.answers.com/topic/stephen-gosson-english-writer