Philip Sidney (1554-2586): In 1580 Sir Philip Sidney began to write the romance called Arcadia. He had displeased the Queen and absented himself from the court. Because of this enforced absence, he visited his sister. With her, he wandered among the groves and gardens of her handsome estate, and for her pleasure, he composed the romance. Arcadia deals with country life, and, like Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, is pastoral. In general, it imitates certain Italian and Portuguese romances. It is full of wonderfully smooth-sounding phrases, but it lacks straightforwardness. Sidney never intended the work to be read by anyone except his sister and her friends, but four years after his death it was published.
Sidney deserves fame for having written a prose work popularly called A Defense of Poesie, published in 1595. It is the first work on literary criticism in English and the reasons given for the pursuit of poetry are as forceful now as then.
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