Sir Philip Sidney's The Defense of Poesy is an attempt to raise poetry above the criticism that had been directed at it by contemporary critics and to establish it as the highest of the arts, best fitted both to please men and to instruct them. The first part of The Defense of Poesy is primarily theoretical: Sidney weighs the respective merits of philosophy, history, and poetry as teachers of virtue. In the final section, he surveys the state of English literature soon after 1580.
Sidney's first argument for the supremacy of poetry, and by poetry he means all imaginative writing in both verse and prose, is that it was the "first light-giver to ignorance"; the first great works of science, philosophy, history, and even law were poems. Both the Italian and the English languages were polished and perfected by their poets, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch on the one hand, Chaucer and Gower on the other. Even Plato illuminated his philosophy with myths and dramatic scenes.
Both the Hebrews and the Romans gave high distinction to poets, considering them prophets, messengers of God or the gods. The Greeks called their writers "makers," creators, who alone could rise above this world to make a "golden" one. Sidney writes of the poet: "So as he goes hand in hand with Nature."
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