Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry occupies a central and even a pivotal position in both the history of literary theory and the history of ideas. It is, however, a work that easily could have gone unwritten. Poetry was, as Sidney says in the Apology, his “unelected vocation.”¹ Sidney’s chosen calling was the active pursuit of the cause for which he believed England, and its queen, was destined: European Protestantism. Happily for English literature, if not for Sidney, the pragmatic Elizabeth did not share Sidney’s zeal, nor did she hesitate, when he displeased her, to deprive him of political and...

Locating a single point of origin for an idea is generally difficult if not impossible. Finding that an original idea was anticipated in an earlier period I take to be commonplace. In the case of the Renaissance discovery of human creativity, it might be argued, for example, that Plato’s Symposium and Ion, works of great importance to Ficino’s Platonic Academy, present far earlier theories of human creativity. The differences between Plato and his followers are, however, no less important than their similarities. If one acknowledges what separates as well as what unites, the Symposium is rightly understood to be about...

In his artful defense of poetry, Sidney draws on a remarkable array of sources, an array that includes works not only from different periods and places but from divergent poetic traditions. Borrowing from his humanist predecessors, especially Boccaccio, Sidney justifies poetry by arguing that the first philosophers were poets and that Christ taught in parables. Calling on classical authorities, Sidney cites Aristotle’s definition of poetry as an art of imitation, as well as Simonides’ metaphorical naming of poetry as a “speaking picture.” He invokes Horace’s twin aims of poetry, profit and delight, which he merges with the three ends of...

Any understanding of Sidney’s poetics hinges on the interpretation of a handful of terms, and perhaps chief among them is “Idea.” According to Sidney, “the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that Idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he hath imagined them” (101). The typographical presentation of “Idea,” capitalized and italicized in both of the original editions of the Apology, indicates that at least the printer thought of it as a special or foreign word. The reason...

Not easily identified with any of the notions of “creativity” circulating today, Sidney’s idea of human creativity more closely resembles the sometimes heady late medieval theories of divine creation. Scholars who have examined the idea of creativity in Sidney’s Apology all agree that it is modeled on divine creation, but they do not agree on which account it mirrors. The range of nuanced models available in sixteenth-century England was great, and a survey of these often subtle theories suggests that Sidney’s model—and likewise his theory of poetic creativity—is far more sophisticated than anyone has yet imagined. After surveying...

Notable by its absence in Sidney’s approach to poetic creativity is any great concern for the subjective experience of the poet, a concern that overshadows Neoplatonic and romantic speculation on creativity. Although creation is an explanation of origins, Sidney does not become fascinated with the originating mind of the poetic genius, nor does he have any interest in the melancholic brooding or the inner turmoil of the poet-artist. Neither does he embrace any of the ubiquitous theories of poetic inspiration—which make much of the rapture or divine frenzy of the poet—nor does he shroud the creative activity in...

If Sidney does in fact conceive of the poet’s work as analogous to the divine work of creation and regeneration, it is surprising that he seems to abandon his theological paradigm when he proceeds from the narratio to the “more ordinary opening” of his next section, the confirmatio. Notably absent are not only lexical parallels of the kind detailed in the preceding chapters, but also the much more obvious biblical allusions such as those to the fall of Adam and the Spirit-like breath of the poet. Grounding his argument on more generally accessible philosophical principles, in the confirmatio Sidney defends...

Although the idea of human creativity reaches its full flourishing in the romantic period, it is the Renaissance that bears witness to its birth. With the birth of creativity situated in this earlier period, the necessary context for understanding the development of the theory is not the subsequent shift in epistemology that Meyer Abrams so persuasively illustrates; it is rather the shift in anthropology that preceded, and indeed enabled, the later change in epistemology. In this anthropological awakening, human beings largely replaced God as the fixed point on which the intellectual and moral universe was thought to turn. Despite the...