ABSTRACT
There is a chain of influence stretching back and up to god, then to David, to the Jews, and (for Donne) to “David’s Successors,” the Sidneys. But others take up the chain after them. Most obviously, the Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, influenced other poets who followed their practice of translating the Psalms into sophisticated english verse. More subtly, however, the Sidney Psalms also shaped the secular-that is, extra-biblical-religious verse of the seventeenth century and beyond. Some of the poets in this line of influence were conscious of their debt to the Sidneys; others, perhaps influenced only indirectly, may not have been.
