ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that many early modern English texts conformed to poetic “making” versus philosophical “discovering” of truth. Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, with ambiguity and irony, championed the truth-making character of poetry (understood as all imaginative writing). More’s Utopia explores the value and necessity of imaginative thinking in the face of injustice, conflicting biases in politics and life, and the limits of language. With equally subtle irony, Sidney’s Defense of Poesy reinterprets Plato and affirms the salutary nature of poetry’s potential to instruct, delight, and create legacies. In saying that poetry does not lie because it “nothing affirms,” Sidney celebrates the human ability to create “new natures,” all the while implying the need for comfort with the indeterminacy of language in any honest approach to truth.
