How Poetry Moves Readers: Sidney, Spenser, and Milton

Abstract

This paper begins from the new emphasis in Sidney's Defence of Poetry on poetry's capacity to move – not simply to teach and delight, the usual formula. Challenging Plato, Gosson, and many others, he argued poetry's superiority to history and philosophy by claiming that it holds forth models of virtue and vice that cannot fail to move readers, respectively, to emulation or abhorrence. Moving the audience is an effect more commonly associated with rhetoric, and Sidney also makes an explicit connection between moving to personal and to political virtue. I argue that Spenser, and later Milton follow Sidney in claiming poetry's power to move in both spheres, but that all these poets develop a much more complex poetics of moving in their literary works: the Old Arcadia, the Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. Within all these works, poetic speakers are shown moving audiences but find they cannot control the audiences' reactions. Sidney, Spenser, and Milton themselves seek to move readers through these works, but now by specifically literary means, inviting readers to experience the passions, complexities, and conflicts that always attend moral and political choices.