A few brief comments on An Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney

I've read this in conversation with brief excerpts from Gosson, Plato, and more extended readings from Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy.

The main note I want to make here is that there is a lot of fluff thrown up by the author about the contradictory arguments that Sidney makes between the first three quarters of his piece and the last fifteen pages or so. After a vituperate defense of poetry against philosophers, historians, and other detractors, the bear turns in on itself and starts speaking against bad poetry, in a few cases going against the very forms that earlier had sounded so wonderful. It also includes a vicious backlash against the contemporary English drama, and especially "the mongrel tragicomedy." The inturning is true.

But I think that, having read the other materials, there is more to say about it. Sidney is apprehensive like Puttenham that poetry should appear to be good, fair, and decorous, out of fear that they should not be well-governed. Hence Puttenham's long tracts on decorum, and Sidney's railing against poetic forms that do not keep to the rules of their elders. The adherence to rules is the central point, though there are other sticks of contention. For Gosson and Plato, poetry is inherently unruly, a clarion call against authority. They would let it in, they both argue, except that it deceives, it is magical, and it cannot be controlled. It is a rival to the state.

Puttenham alleviates the tension by showing how poetry is so often subordinated to the state, and teaching subordination to the state (decorum) as a necessary precondition of poetry. Sidney alleviates the tension between authority and poetry by demonstrating how poetry is self-governed in ways not incompatible with authority. He defends the form of poetry as having many good uses, the language as being conducive to good poetry, but must go after the individual practitioner for then not governing himself under Sidney's classical rubric for good poetry and drama. Comedy should incite delight, while laughter, uncontrolled, turns against the images of virtue he earlier espoused. I'd say that, if one pays attention to how Sidney works with poetry earlier, on the main it's not surprising that he ends with his attacks. He cannot yet assert the freedom of poets, so instead he must assert another monarchy, a monarchy of style.