11/1/07 - English Literature - Sir Philip Sidney: The Defense of Poesy

There are problems of language in historical texts which must be overcome.
What assumptions does one bring to bear on historical texts?
Sense of past being being dead and gone. Remnants and leftovers. But literary texts can also speak to us.
Our experience of the past is influenced by museums, libraries, etc.

"I began with the desire to speak with the dead.
The desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organised, professionalised, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans. If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all Icould hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living."
[Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford 1988), 1]

Greenblatt explores a desire or a wish for proximity and contact with the dead.
"Shamans" - haunting, mysterious, summoning of the dead.
Sense of possession; the words we speak are the words of the dead - they have been given to us. The dead speak through us.
Haunting - when the dead of the past somehow inhabit the present. A collision of past and present.

Sidney wrote his Defense of Poesy because people of the time, particularly Puritans, thought that at worst poetry was morally wrong, and at best merely frivolous and pointless.

Sidney argues that poetry takes many forms, such as drama, apic, comedy and tragedy.

"Poetry therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in this word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth - to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture - with this end, to teach and delight." [NTC 331]

So poetry is used for representing; it imitates; it is a kind of summoning.
"Counterfeiting" suggests poetry is fraudulent, so it is a dubious word to use in a defence of the subject.
"To teach and delight" is the purpose of poetry. Borrowed somewhat from Horace.

"But when by the balance of experience it was found that the astronomer, looking to the stars, might fall into a ditch, that the inquiring philosopher might be blind in himself, and the mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart, then lo did proof, the overruler of opinions, make manifest that all these are but serving sciences, which, as they have each a private end in themselves, so yet are they all directed to the highest end of the mistress knowledge ... which stands (as I think) in the knowledge of a man's self, in the ethic and polite consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only." [NTC 333]

"The philosopher and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and the general that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand." [NTC 335]

"On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine." [NTC 335]

"I think truly, that of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar, and, though he would, as a poet can scarcely be a liar. The astronomer, with his cousin the geometrician, can hardly escape, when they take upon them to measure the height of the stars ... And no less of the rest, which take upon them to affirm. Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet (as I said before) never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes ... And therefore, as in history looking for truth, [men] go away full fraught with falsehood, so in poesy looking for fiction, the shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention." [NTC 348-9]

For Sidney, poetry gets us closer to the most important thing you can know - how to get on in the world. None of the other sciences - philosophy, history - can get so close to this, although one might assume that these are most likely to. Philosophy is hard to understand, it's abstract. History tells us about the past but has no conclusion, no morals, no rules. Poetry does. Poetry does not lie because it does not claim to be true (hence "counterfeiting") and it still gives moral teaching. Poetry is a glimpse outside of history.