ABSTRACT
In The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney relegates historical poetry, along with poems that “deal with matters philosophical” to the margins of his own exploration of “the first and most noble” sort of poetry, the vatic flights of poets who do not limit themselves to imitating “what is, hath been, or shall be.”1 The poet that interests him “disdain[s] to be tied to any such subjection” and, “lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature.”2 This bracingly masculine portrait of the proper sort of poet, while much admired and imitated, was also much ignored and resisted. Even Fulke Greville, Sidney’s Boswell, clearly disturbed by The Arcadia’s untrimmed invention, deems it “inferior to that unbounded spirit of his,”3 at least implying that there is a subjection or bondage in Sidney’s flight from the referential. He concludes his life of Sidney with another assessment of The Arcadia: “I wish that work may be the last in his kind.” He goes on to contrast his own work with Sidney’s: “For my own part, I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit.”4 Greville’s humble contrast of the poetry of “life” and the poetry of “wit” modestly states the case for a poetics more directly engaged in historical and political analysis and argumentation than that esteemed by Sidney. For Greville, fixing on “images of life” means ruminating on political theory and counsel, as he did in his closet dramas and A Treatise of Monarchy. What Sidney considers “subjection” to nature, Greville understands rather as a consideration of the “true stage” of life.5
