- first of English sonnet sequences - watershed of English Renaissance poetry
- tracks development of love affair between Astrophil (astro = star, phil = lover) and Stella (star)
- in most poems Astrophil is the speaker and Stella is the receiver
- presence of allegorical personalities - Reason, Love, Queen Virtue, Sleep
- Sidney partially nativizes key features of Petrarchan sonnet
- experiments with rhyme scheme
- somewhat autobiographical - based on Sidney's love for Penelope Devereux
- Astrophil is in love with Stella but Stella marries someone else, even though she is unhappy in her marriage
"The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia"
- Prose punctuated by poems
- Includes "Ye Goatheard Gods" - a double sestina
- work is a romance with pastoral elements
- idealized version of shepherd's life with stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles and rapes
- Shakespeare borrowed from it for the subplot of King Lear
- Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela
"A Defense of Poesy"
- First work of literary criticism in English
- integrates classical and Italian precepts on fiction
- believed to be directed against Stephen Gosson who wrote School of Abuse, a tract claiming that playwrights and theater had led English society astray
- poesy refers to all forms of literature
- argument is that poetry is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue
- the work also comments on Elizabethan stage and Edmund Spenser
- Quotes:
- "The poet he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth."
- "He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness, but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the sweet enchanting skill of music..."
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