Sidney's Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations, Volume 10

"It is one of the curious facts of his literary history that Sir Phillip Sidney, who Astrophel and Stella marks the beginning of the vogue for sonnet cycles in England, stands almost at the end of a highly sophisticated tradition in Europe. Praised by his contemporaries as the English Petrarch, he shows ironic regard for a tradition, Italian and French, of which he is one of the last representatives. As Mr. Kalstone says in his preface, Sidney has complete 'scorn for mere imitation, for the dead handof the past in the work of those who caught up certaine swelling phrases, which hang together, like a man which once told mee, the winde was at North West, and by South, because he would be sure to name windes enowe.' Sidney revitalizes the Petrarchan vision while calling its values into question; he fashions the sonnet into a form responsive to new conflicts, new antagonisms. Mr. Kalstone is concerned with both the pastoral verse of The Countesses of Pembroke's Arcadia and the love sonnet of Astrophel and Stella. The opening chapters are devoted to recovering strains of the Italian literary past that would have had lively importance for Sidney as a poet. But the 'contexts' here are not only those of a poetic tradition, but also those provided by Sidney's verse may be read and an approach to lyrics whose richer effects might otherwise escape us. Mr. Kalstone sees in Sidney's poetry one reaction to a problem that was general in the English Renaissance, the problem of domesticating several centuries of European literary experience. English writers were subject at once to the currents and countercurrents of the Renaissance, the spirit of witty skepticism existing beside continued efforts in traditional genres. Sidney's practice illuminates the solutions of later poets; he is engaged in the complex love poetry of Shakespeare and Donne." -Publisher,