The Defence of Poesy

Sir Philip Sidney begins his treatise with a brief “Exordium,” or introduction. He relates an anecdote in which he and a friend, while visiting Italy, met the officer who ran Emperor Maximilian II’s royal stables. This officer, John Pietro Pugliano, spoke vigorously but inexpertly about the art of horsemanship. Although Sidney mocks Pugliano, this anecdote inspires the author to deliver a similar pseudo-speech in defense of his own passion, poetry.

Having established a motivation for this work, Sidney begins the “Narration” section of the essay. Here, he outlines in brief the supremacy of poetry and poets over other disciplines. The author traces the origins (and pinnacle) of poetry back to antiquity. He lists the achievements of the greatest poets of the past, from the Greek bard Homer to the slightly more recent English poets Gower and Chaucer. Offering a broad definition of poetry, Sidney even attributes the success of the greatest philosophers and historiographers to poetry. As he explains, authors of neither genre “could at the first have entered into the gates of popular judgements, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry” (20).