Sir Philip Sidney's Poetics

According to the contemporary aesthetic theory, the object of aesthetics is not ambiguous beauty but clarified art. Amazingly, literature and art cherished by people has no reason to survive in human history naturally, whose existence is to be expounded and proved by poets. Since Plato vilified the poets and Aristotle founded the poetics by means of arguing in defense of poets, the premise of aesthetics has been to defend the truth of literature. As a result, the defense of literature and art has become the principal literary style in western aesthetics.Sir Philip Sidney is the first English poet-critic, and although his literary works exhibit a trace of his poetics about both craft and function of poetry, his importance to the history of literary theory rests on a single work: An Apology of Poetry. To defend poetry and protect the poets, Sidney refutes the attack imposed on the poem by Christian.The thesis puts the emphasis on three chapters:Chapter one, consisting of three sections, enacts the theoretical source of Sidney's poetics, which is on the basis of Aristotle, Horace and Plato's literary theory.The second chapter consists of two sections, in which Sidney's description of poetry as creating a separate reality is crucial both to his defense and to subsequent theoretical understandings of poetic discourse.The third chapter is about poetry's function of poetry including poetry's ability to enlighten, poetry's power to move and poetry's task to practice. In this chapter, Sidney asserts the didactic role of literature, which guides readers to discriminate the virtue and vice by means of sentimental delight. Owing to the poetry's sentimental effect and delight, readers are affected by the function of moving and shaped into virtuous action.Above all, although Sidney's poetics lays the particular emphasis on literary aesthetics lacking in deep philosophical meditation owing to the limitation of times, his reasonable arguments about literary creation is affected by people in a taste of...