Sidney's Idea of the "Right Poet"

Abstract

HOUGH Sidney's Apology for Poetry was the critical manifesto for poets and critics in the Elizabethan age, its subsequent history is unfortunate. Its influence does not extend beyond the seventeenth century-Swift remarks that Sidney wrote if he really believed himself-and later, mainly through Shelley's ecstatic quarrying, it was reduced to a noble though extravagant panegyric upon poetry. After Spingarn revealed its sources in Renaissance Italian criticism, it was seen as a gracious restatement of the thoughts of others, what oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd. C. M. Dowlin has made the only attempt to rehabilitate Sidney as a thinker.l He showed that the sources usually cited for Sidney's doctrine that imitation alone constitutes poetry are not valid; but then he found its probable source in Robortello.