Sir Phillip Sidney: A Critical Analysis Of Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), is (considered) the creator of the Elizabethan sonnet and a gentleman in every sense of the word for the Elizabethans to admire. The Renaissance had an increasingly secular orientation in the conception of the versatile Renaissance man, (FN: find powerpoint/evernote) being a soldier, knight and poet (FN: Norton, p1037,) with own artistic perspective, Sir Philip Sidney embraced the autonomous and independent individual by writing Astrophil and Stella in the 1580s. As previously stated, this sonnet sequence contains 108 sonnets and eleven songs, all dedicated to relieving the poet-lover Astrophil of the feeling of having unrequited feelings towards Stella, someone whom others have presumed to be an actual (person

Assuming that Astrophil, the lover-poet and narrator of these love sonnet sequences, is also a man of the Renaissance, creating this sonnet sequence is a (humble) way of assuring Stella that he is, in some way, also a gentleman and of integrity as poetry is a skill that is praised and therefore worthy of being noticed. (These sonnets and songs are considered

He goes on to calling them “Pindar’s apes” (S3, L3), Pindar being one of the most famous ancient Greek poets, mocking their ideas by ironically calling them “thoughts of gold”. (S3, L,4) He capitalizes in the second quatrains the things that are foreign to him, the exotic African or Indian similes that the poets use and the use of new figurative to twist old sayings be elaborate. Sidney exclaims that he has no use of such things, less of imitation of others. He is too poor to be elaborate and extravagant and use exotic matters for similes. Instead, he is writing naturally by using his one and only muse, Stella. He puts Nature over Study, and therefore implies that Stella’s face holds all love and beauty he will need, which is why it is only natural to write from what nature has granted him. His reason for being frustrated is that he attempted, at first, to place Study over Nature, which is impossible because nothing overrules nature. He emphasizes this in sonnet six, where he is describing other poet’s various methods of expressing their love as an overwhelming force that makes them use contradicting extremes such as “living deaths” and “freezing fires”. (S6, L2-3) Sidney’s originality and individuality is evident here, when he