Sidney and 'energia'

This study of Sidney moves from a consideration of the intellectual background behind the formulation of Sidney's poetic theory and the poetic concepts dealt with in the Analogy for Poetry to an examination of the sonnets of Astronhil and Stella, on which rests Sidney's chief claim to fame as one of the finest and most fascinating poets of the English Renaissance, As the headings of the ensuing chapters indicate, the way in which Sidney put his poetic ideas into practice in Astrophil and Stella constitutes the main object of study. Starting from the contemplation of the ironical, self-deprecating manner in which Sidney persistently talked about poetry and the apparent contradiction with the high claims as the mistress of all the arts and sciences that he made for poetry in the Apology, the Introduction outlines in broad brush the fundamentally ethical and religious character of the humanistic culture of the Renaissance, being the inescapable framework against which Sidney developed his poetic ideas. Chapter One sets out to examine Sidney's theory of poetry as embodied in the Apology for Poetry, and scrutinizes the various critical terms Sidney refers to in the Apology, notably 'imitation', 'genius', 'wit', 'invention', 'speaking picture', 'Idea' or 'fore-conceit' and above all 'onergia'. Chapter Two focuses on the idea of 'energia', which Sidney put forward in the APOLOGY as the stylistic ideal which poets should seek to achieve and examines it from various angles. Chapter Three outlines the literary background against which Sidney commenced his poetic career, in particular the rise of the vernacular in the sixteenth century, the tendency towards the cultivation of 'elequence' by way of the 'exornation' of the language, and the close affiliation between rhetoric and poetry. Chapter Four proposes to examine Astrophil and Stella as a manifestation of Sidney's poetic inner search for the 'energetic' mode of writing poetry. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)