Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich.

On mynethistoryofilosophy.net, today's episode, Heaven Bread Poetry, Philip Sydney and Edmund Spencer.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Philip Sydney and Edmund Spencer weren't they famous poets, not philosophers? What are they doing on this podcast?

Well, I'm not one to rely on mirror appeals to authority, and if I were, then the subject of our last episode Richard Hooker would have shown me the error of my ways.

Still, when great authorities are on my side, there's no harm in mentioning it, especially when the authority in question is Aristotle.

So I'm going to start this discussion by reminding you that Aristotle's writings include a work called the Poetics, a foundational work of literary theory.

Even better, it features a passage in which Aristotle compares the writing of poetry to the writing of history, and says that the poet's enterprise is more philosophical.

This is because poetry concerns itself more with the universal, whereas history speaks of the particular.

Thanks to the humanist movement, this passage and the Poetics in general were well known in Elizabethan England, and in this context Aristotle's judgment was used to support an even bolder claim that poetry is superior not only to history, but also to philosophy itself.

I trust that Aristotle would not agree, and as you might imagine, neither do I. If I did, you'd be listening to the poetry podcast without any gap, starting with epic and ending with rap.

But we philosophers should always be ready to listen to counter arguments, so let's turn to the proponent of this claim, Philip Sidney.

He was innovative in his poetic style, though he's perhaps best known as the author of a prose work, the romantic pastoral tale, Arcadia.

It does show some interest in philosophy, but I want to focus here on a much shorter text, his brief defense of poetry.

The title already raises a question, why would anyone have felt the need to defend poetry in the Elizabethan period?

This was the age of Shakespeare, after all.

True, but to Sidney's mind, Queen Elizabeth's court was not doing all it could to support the cause of literature.

Furthermore, this was also the age of religious reform when the arts could provoke considerable anxiety, if not outright opposition.

In particular, poetry could easily be associated with classical pagan culture, or the medieval and hence Catholic literary tradition.

Roger Asham's humanist work on education, the schoolmaster, made this point when it decried the rude, beggarly rhyming that had been brought into England from Papist Europe by men of excellent wit indeed, but of small learning and less judgment.

So there was pressure on the poets to show how their chosen art could be reconciled with the structures of a godly Protestant society, and Sidney had an additional reason to be on the defensive about poetry.

As grandson of the Duke of Northumberland, he was a high-ranking aristocrat, who might have been expected to distinguish himself through warfare and diplomacy, not by writing verse.

By this measure, he was not a complete failure. He was even knighted in 1583, one year before his early death at the age of only 31, but he fell out of royal favor after advocating to openly for a strong stance against Spain.

...