Apology For Poetry Research Articles

Philip Sidney's 'An Apology for Poetry': A Scholarly Analysis

In this article, an attempt was made to present a scholarly analysis of “An Apology for poetry” written by Philip Sidney. Sidney in his work expressed critical guidelines to create understanding about the poetry among readers. According to him, poetry is a particular form of communication, particularly when addressing complex relationships that require additional rhetorical effort, such as persuasion and art. He subdivided the creative poetry to make a clear sense to his readers and made strong arguments about the creative nature of imitative poetry. Poetry is noble to all sciences and it comes from the poet’s heart and ideas of imagination. He defended the accusations against poetry and established the environment of understanding about poetry’s importance and excellence for his readers for the sake of the audience’s stronger development in understanding and deep effective learning.

The Art of Poetry and the Art of Memory: Philip Sidney’s Mnemonic Poetics

This article explores the significance of the art of memory as a mnemonic poetics in Philip Sidney’s literary theory and practice. The art of memory is more than an ancient mnemonic method, I argue; rather, it constitutes a poetics that evolves from Plato to Petrarch as part of an interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about how the past is remembered (particularly through love stories) and remade in the present. This tradition of mnemonic poetics is central to Sidney’s portrayal of the art of poetry as an art of memory in his Apology for Poetry, a tradition that Sidney remembers anew in his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. Sidney constructs his poem as a memory theatre in which he demonstrates and indeed dramatizes the art of memory indirectly and ironically: through a poetic persona, Astrophil, who longs for an “art of forgetting” in his pursuit of originality.

Sidney’s Eurocentric Polemic: A Postcolonial Exegesis of “An Apology for Poetry“

Sidney’s Eurocentric Polemic: A Postcolonial Exegesis of “An Apology for Poetry“

The Importance of Instapoetry in Light of Dominant Forms with Special Reference to Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey

Recently Instapoetry, a form of minimalist poetry, has emerged as a result of using Instagram as a platform for expression. It has strived to gain validity since many of Instapoets have gained millions of followers who have approved this kind of writing which, most of the time, is accompanied by advertisements that symbolize the hidden economic agenda that controls who will get published. However, Instapoetry has been and is still being faced by a wave of disapproval. The paper’s argument is to verify the validity and investigate the reliability of Instapoetry, an emergent subgenre, by measuring it against the dominant literary canon which includes areas of the residual. The paper sheds light on how the Marxist economic approach to literature reproduction affects this newly-exercised type of poetry; to what extent Instapoetry can be considered a mirror of social values, and how it can be a form of propaganda. The researcher compares theories of poetry in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry in order to formulate measurements, a paradigm, against which this, and other future types, of poetry can be tested, putting in mind the economic factor that has changed the map of publishing houses in the UK and the USA in 2017 for example.

Philosophy Can Be The Genuine Source Of Literature But Not Superior To Literature: A Study

After reading Sir Philip Sidney’s “ An Apology For Poetry” , I must say philosophy can be the format of writing literature but not superior to literature. In other words philosophy is theory , literature is practical. After World War –II , many great philosophers emerged with the high philosophical approach like Existentialism, Absurdist ,Surrealism etc. But all these thoughts got more vitality in the form of literature.

Philosophy Can Be The Genuine Source Of Literature But Not Superior To Literature: A Study

After reading Sir Philip Sidney’s “ An Apology For Poetry” , I must say philosophy can be the format of writing literature but not superior to literature. In other words philosophy is theory , literature is practical. After World War –II , many great philosophers emerged with the high philosophical approach like Existentialism, Absurdist ,Surrealism etc. But all these thoughts got more vitality in the form of literature.

Philosophy Can Be The Genuine Source Of Literature But Not Superior To Literature: A Study

After reading Sir Philip Sidney’s “ An Apology For Poetry” , I must say philosophy can be the format of writing literature but not superior to literature. In other words philosophy is theory , literature is practical. After World War –II , many great philosophers emerged with the high philosophical approach like Existentialism, Absurdist ,Surrealism etc. But all these thoughts got more vitality in the form of literature.

Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–1660. Edited by Stephen B. Dobranski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+365.

<i>Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–1660</i>. Edited by Stephen B. Dobranski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+365.

The Concept of Empire in the Elizabethan Literature: Reading Persia in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays

The Elizabethan literature was fascinated by the representations of ancient and contemporary Persian Empire, as well as the figures like Cyrus the Great. The main historical sources about Persia that the English writers used, beside the Old Testament, were the writings of Xenophon and Herodotus. However, it was Xenophon that caught the attention of two prominent Elizabethan: Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. Their use of Persian images and figures in their texts was as an act of opposition to the Tudor foreign policy that supported Anglo-Ottoman ties in the 1570s and 1580s. The researchers, therefore, aim to analyse the anti-Ottoman discourse by using Persian Empire and identity in Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great plays (1590) by applying comparative analysis and close reading. The researchers, moreover, explore the way in which the Sidney’s and Marlowe’s aesthetic engagements aim at the initiation of the project of English empire-building based upon the Achaemenid and Safavid Persia along with representation of Persians as an imaginatively alternative self for the English people.

Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Golden World’: Ekphrasis and Sidney’s Apology in Part 1 of Tamburlaine the Great

IT is a critical commonplace that Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays changed the dramatic landscape of the early modern period by ‘liberat[ing] English drama from the complacencies of both its academic and its popular conventions’.1 In examinations of the ruptural force of the two plays, Part 1 is routinely singled out for particular attention, and has attracted a raft of critical praise.2 Yet despite the extraordinary amount of attention and adulation that extant criticism has afforded 1 Tamburlaine, it has overlooked a key aesthetic practice: Marlowe’s dramatic experiments with the classical concept of ekphrasis. In Murray Krieger’s formulation, ekphrasis is the verbal description of a visual work of art that momentarily ‘freezes’ the action of the main narrative and, through the dynamism of enargeia (intensity of description), ‘use[s] words to yield so vivid a description that they—dare we say literally?—place the represented object before the reader’s (hearer’s) inner eye’.3 In this essay, I suggest that Marlowe engages ekphrasis in Part 1 to explicitly invite audiences—by which I mean the play’s original audience, audiences within the play, and critics—to view Tamburlaine not as a man, and even less as a quasi-historical figure derived from sources available to Marlowe, but as a work of art. My discussion aims to demonstrate that Marlowe employs Tamburlaine-as-artwork to create a poetic kingdom—the play proper—in ways that engage the ‘golden world’ that Sir Philip Sidney’s theorizes in his Apology for Poetry. The crucial passage in the Apology follows:

Wittgenstein and Modernism

Wittgenstein and Modernism Michael Fischer Even in a journal with the welcoming title Philosophy and Literature, contributors rightly feel obliged to explain why they are relating philosophical and literary texts to one another. Seeing literature as an engagingly vivid, "speaking picture" "figuring forth" the difficult abstractions of philosophy (to borrow from Sir Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry) was once a default way of linking the two. But such a connection shortchanges the thinking at work in literature, reducing it to a popularizing tool, and overlooks the stories, examples, and metaphors that inform some powerful works of philosophy. The most thoughtful work on philosophy and literature now sees them contributing in distinctive, equally forceful ways to shared cognitive and ethical goals. The wide-ranging essays collected in Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism1 and Wittgenstein and Modernism2 show the benefits of bringing literature and philosophy into conversation with each other as equal partners. Both books explore how Wittgenstein's achievements in philosophy relate to modernism in the arts. As the editors of these two volumes note, Wittgenstein and modernism invite comparison. As a starting point, Wittgenstein and modernist writers, composers, and artists responded to the same historical moment. The English translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus appeared in 1922, [End Page 463] the annus mirabilis of modernism in which The Waste Land, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room were published. In addition, Wittgenstein's receptivity to the literary qualities of philosophy—his claim in a 1934 notebook, for example, that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition"—suggests an affinity with the arts that bodes well for associating him with modernism. Simply assimilating Wittgenstein into modernism, however, runs into difficulty, partly because Wittgenstein disliked much of the modernist architecture, visual art, and music he encountered, leading him to prefer Schubert over Mahler, for example, and dismiss artists such as Picasso and Duchamp. Wittgenstein's remarkable development beyond the Tractatus complicates things further and works against establishing his standing as modernist on that book alone. I like the fact that the contributors to these two volumes use Wittgenstein's proximity to modernism—and distance from it—to raise questions instead of relying on one to explain the other. Some of the contributors explore which aspects of Wittgenstein's work come to light when we place them in the context of modernism, while others focus on how our understanding of modernism shifts when we count Wittgenstein as a modernist writer. Rethinking Wittgenstein in the context of modernism generates the best critical work when the contributors pair specific modernist writers and artists with Wittgenstein, among them James Joyce, Robert Musil, Arnold Schoenberg, Wallace Stevens, and Franz Kafka. One of the best essays in Wittgenstein and Modernism, Michael LeMahieu's "Bellow's Private Language," shows how Bellow and Wittgenstein respond differently to their common interest in the idea of a private language. Another fine essay, Garry L. Hagberg's "A Confluence of Modernisms: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation and Henry James's Literary Language," in Understanding Wittgenstein, compares how Wittgenstein and James contest a dualistic picture of language that separates inner mental content from subsequent expression. In each essay, we see modernism in progress, taking shape as a writer and a philosopher think through a complex question in distinctive but mutually illuminating ways. Another essay in Understanding Wittgenstein, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock's "Too Cavellian a Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein's Certainty, Cavell's Scepticism," deserves mention for resisting a conclusion that guides some of the other contributors, namely, that modernism as defined by Stanley Cavell sheds light on Wittgenstein. Moyal-Sharrock objects that Cavell's casting of Wittgenstein as a modernist distorts him, making him "too Cavellian" in his preoccupation with skepticism, disappointment, [End Page 464] and alienation. For Moyal-Sharrock, Wittgenstein's work "sows enlightenment, community and certainty," keeping "Wittgenstein—both early and late—from being a modernist in any but a broad, vague sense" (UWUM, p. 92). While I appreciate the editor including Moyal-Sharrock's dissenting opinion, her portrait of Wittgenstein's thought is much too rosy for me. As a counterweight to her argument, I recommend David Schalkwyk's "Wittgenstein and the Art of Defamiliarization" in the...

English Literary Renaissance (Winter, 2017, pp. 1–192; Spring, 2017, pp. 193–323; Autumn, 2017, pp. 325–448)

English Literary Renaissance (Winter, 2017, pp. 1–192; Spring, 2017, pp. 193–323; Autumn, 2017, pp. 325–448)

Wit and The Art of Memory in Nashe’sThe Unfortunate Traveller

This essay explores the importance of the art of memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe represents the art of memory not only as a rhetorical method (using places and images to construct a location for memory), but also as his own literary method. Nashe draws attention to his prose poetics of memory throughout the novella, particularly in its framing device: as the narrator Jack Wilton tells his tale at the local English pub, he constructs a memory theater of sorts, a building-cum-book of memory that recollects both his personal history and the history of the Renaissance. Jack delivers his story as though he is a courtier, an orator, and a poet-performer, roles linked in the mnemonic tradition—from Cicero’s On the Orator, to Castiglione’s The Courtier, to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry—that Nashe inherits and reforms. Beginning with Nashe’s earliest writing, I examine his career-long concern with the relationship of the art of memory to the art of concealing art, an expression of the ideal courtier’s wit, and an important concept in The Unfortunate Traveller. [R.H]

The Poet as Feigned Example in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Poet as Feigned Example in Sidney’s Apology for PoetryAndrew ShifflettAndrew ShifflettUniversity of South Carolina Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 1August 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686487 Views: 1239Total views on this site © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Syncretistic Religion in Shakespeare's Late Romances

By claiming that the recovery and translation of Greek texts and a renewed interest in Roman and Ancient culture defines the Renaissance, historians have insured that syncretism appears everywhere in Renaissance thought and art. Often syncretistic blends of Ancient and Christian ideas create memorable impasses, even contradictions. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry (1579, publ. 1595), concluded that “our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching [enacting] it.” 1 In the first part of this assertion, Sidney taps into Christian Neo-Platonism. He has just argued that the inspired poet can deliver a “golden” world in his writing, better than the “brazen” nature in which we live, because he can intuit heavenly Ideas. Pico dell Mirandola, Baldassare Castiglione, and other Renaissance Humanists had given Neo-Platonism a Christian cast when they proclaimed that divine love could transform the soul “into an Aungell,” whereby “it understandeth all thinges that may be understoode: and without any veile or cloude, she seeth the meine sea of the pure heavenlye beawtye.” 2 Sir John Davies, in his late Elizabethan poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), almost agrees: So, many stayres we must ascend vpright Ere wee attaine to Wisdom’s high degree; So doth this Earth eclipse our Reason’s light. Which else (in instants) would like angels see. 3

The Case for Poetry

The Case for Poetry Henry Hart (bio) Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini (Yale University Press, 2008. 224 pages. $24) In his controversial essay “Can Poetry Matter?” published in 1991, the poet-critic (and current director of the National Endowment for the Humanities) Dana Gioia argues: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.” Gioia blames many factors for the decline of poetry’s influence in the public domain, among them “the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures.” His essay, which incurred the wrath of critics and poets alike, offers a gloomy diagnosis, but also prescribes a cure. It concludes with six “modest proposals” that encourage “poets and poetry teachers [to] take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.” Jay Parini’s new book, Why Poetry Matters, alludes to Gioia’s essay and provides an elegant, acute, and multifaceted answer to his question “Can Poetry Matter?” While Parini acknowledges the insularity of poetry in contemporary culture, his approach to the problem differs from Gioia’s. Rather than indict creative-writing programs (Gioia maintains “they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto”), Parini places most of the blame on the noisy seductiveness of other media. “The culture is clamorous,” he observes, “with a television blaring in most living rooms, magazines proliferating, and earphones downloading a great deal of garbage into the heads of millions on the subways and byways of the world. There is little time for concentration, or a space wherein the still, small voice of poetry can be heard.” Why Poetry Matters is a history, an anthology, and also a meditation that pays tribute to poetry’s “still, small voice” struggling in the cultural wilderness of more powerful and more popular forms of communication. Poets and scholars have long tried to define the nebulous “essence” of poetry in a way that distinguishes it from other media. Parini is more qualified than most to attempt such a definition because he has worked in many different genres: he is a [End Page lii] distinguished poet and critic as well as a distinguished biographer, editor, and novelist (his novel about Tolstoy, The Last Station, is currently being made into a feature film starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren). Parini begins his book by examining the prejudice against poetry in Western culture that extends as far back as Plato and Socrates. The two Greek philosophers denigrated poetry, Parini reminds us, because they thought it trafficked in lies, in imitations of imitations (linguistic imitations of things that were imitations of ideal forms). Plato excluded poets from his utopian Republic because they valued frenzied inspiration and passion over calm rational philosophy. In mounting his case for poetry against its numerous detractors, Parini alludes to Sir Philip Sidney’s famous “Apology for Poetry,” Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry,” and many other treatises that defend as well as define poetry. Because poetry is essentially shaped language, Parini sensibly focuses on its linguistic elements—its figures of speech and formal patterns—that have traditionally distinguished poetry (and continue to distinguish it) from other genres and media. He goes on to contemplate the ways it has addressed religious, political, and scientific (especially ecological) issues in the past and present. If there is one central idea that resonates through Parini’s book, it is that “poetry aspires to the condition of scripture.” In his preface he candidly remarks: “The language of poetry can, I believe, save us. It can ground us in spiritual and moral realities, offering the consolations of philosophy, teaching us how to speak about our lives, and how—indeed—to live them.” Parini is no aesthete advocating art for art’s sake. Instead he is a transcendental pragmatist whose roots as a critic, he admits, align him with Emerson, Coleridge, and other romantic thinkers who emphasized the redemptive and transcendental aspects of poetry. For Parini “poetry becomes useful [by] helping readers to comprehend their lives, to catch their ideas in language, [and] to...

Law and Literature and the LLB: An Apology for Poetry in the Undergraduate Law Curriculum

A survey of UK law schools suggests that only 'three or four' offer Law and Literature as an optional subject on their Qualifying Law Degrees (Harris & Beinart, 2005). This number seems surprisingly low, given the proliferation of Law and Literature literature since the emergence of this distinctive approach to thinking about law in the US in the 1970s, the widespread availability of Law and Literature courses in US law schools, and the advocacy of Law and Literature studies on law degrees by a number of UK academics throughout the 1990s (for example, Lee, 1990; Aristodemou, 1993; Ward, 1993; Bradney, 2000).

‘Critical And Curious Learning’

During the Long Restoration a new type of literary criticism emerged out of an intellectual milieu in which both neoclassicism and the new science were becoming dominant discourses. Both were profoundly influential in this development because of their intense interest in the issue of how the mind produced words and the language that they generated. In this light, the paper argues that the new scientists were not hostile to rhetoric or eloquence, seeing these as vital to their attempts to formulate a code of scientific language, and illustrations of the new-science attitude to rhetoric and eloquence are drawn from Bacon, Sprat, and Wilkins. The neoclassical concern that literature both instruct and delight, that it be lively and just, leads critical theorists during the Restoration to consider how a writer can produce writings which fulfil these two aims, and in doing so they rely on new-science insights into mental processes and language to investigate the operations of dispositio and inventio in the production of literary works. Analysis of the anonymous ‘An Apology for Poetry, in an Essay directed to Walter Moil Esq.’ and Thomas Rymer'sAn Essay, Concerning Critical and Curious Learning illustrates how new theorizing that was motivated by a desire to understand the role of imagination in the writing process created a new criticism.

Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology by Daniel Punday (review)

748 Reviews Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. By Daniel Punday. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. x + 234pp. ?42.50. ISBN 1-4039-6241-3. Daniel Punday announces that 'After a decade of suspicion about language's ability to referto anything beyond itself,the body has emerged as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out' (p. 1). He argues that narratology, with its insistence on abstraction, 'has had difficultydealing with the concrete historical object of the human body', while new historicism 'has made no attempt to generalize its analysis of the body in these narratives beyond the particular historical moment that it studies' (p. 9). His own approach uses the body as a catalyst for a combination of elements from both; the resulting synthesis should be taken into account by any serious student of critical theory, especially if the body is a main focus of interest. Punday briskly summarizes the views ofa host oftwentieth-century critics,with every point clarified by a well-chosen illustration from a wide range of Western narrative, discursive, and dramatic literature, extending fromclassical Greek epic and tragedy to modern science fiction. Such an erudite scholar need not fear that plain speaking will incur loss of academic dignity. Consequently, the reader finds the following down-toearth items on the critical agenda: 'we can ask how the body is used as a component of stories', and 'a corporeal narratology can ask how the body contributes to our ways of speaking about and analyzing narrative' (p. ix). Punday's theory, though expressed with admirable clarity, is sophisticated and complex: not every body can be a narrative body. He claims that 'one of the essential conditions for meaningful narrative is to sort bodies from nonbodies' (p. 58). This point is explicated by a contrast between the status of Polynices' corpse in Sophocles' Antigone, 'endowed with cultural and familial significance', and that of corpses in 'most contemporary popular action films and adventure stories', where, 'once the characters are dead, their bodies are inanimate and thus, narratively at least, no longer bodies at all' (p. 59). Punday shows how, in Marge Piercy's He, She and It, the heroine's, and consequently the reader's, attention is directed to the problematic nature ofthe body by her interest in a 'very human-like robot' (p. 58). And what can we make of a novel like William Gibson's Neuromancer, where a character 'is wired with virtual reality technology so that he can share in the physical experiences of another character' (p. 122)? Much of Narrative Bodies1 interest lies in the exciting critical and narrative possibilities that arise from the difficultyof defining the term 'body'. On some rare occasions, an even wider range of reference might have filled gaps or removed obscurities. The philosophie difficultyof 'making truthfulclaims' (p. 20) about fictitious characters provokes a laborious analysis of possible-world theory, in which the statements 'I hope that it stops raining this afternoon' and 'I could bake a cake if I'd stopped at the grocery' (pp. 20-21) are ofTeredas parallels to the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes lives in London' (p. 19). Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry could have saved a lot of trouble, with its reminder that the author of fiction 'nothing af? firms,and therefore never lieth'. It would also be interesting to see how discussion of Tristram Shandy might enrich the argument, especially in Chapter 1, 'Conceiving Modern Narrative', where developments in fiction from the early eighteenth century onwards are intimately related to changing theories about fertilization and embryology . At least, its absence should have been explained. Even without Sterne's help, however, Punday has created a convincing argument?or rather,as he says of Foucault and Butler (p. 109), constructed a very good 'plot'. University of Reading Carolyn D. Williams ...

Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England

Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies. Through readings of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's The Temple, Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.