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The Poet as Feigned Example in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry

The hero of Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595) is “the peerless poet.” He has no peers in other professions or even in his own, for Sidney implies that he, unlike the noble lion and the gentle swain, stands above the class he represents. Like the famous city from which lesser poets have always been exiled, this poet exists in words alone. He would lead his readers to a similar state. The fictionality of Sidney’s poet may once have been too much of a commonplace to warrant an essay on the topic. In 1965, in his magisterial introduction to the Apology, Geoffrey Shepherd declared the poet to be “an ideal . . . drawn from antiquity . . . most readily to be compared with the ideal of the orator as set out by Cicero and Quintilian.” This was a scholar’s way of saying that Sidney makes up the poet he defends. Like the orator whom the orators of Cicero’s De oratore find it necessary to feign, and the courtier formed “con parole” by Castiglione’s courtiers in their nightly game, the poet represents a culture’s unfulfilled desiresmore