Gosson had denounced
poetry as "the vizard of vanity, wantonness, and folly"; or, in Sidney's
paraphrase, as "the mother of lies and the nurse of abuse". Sidney
replies by urging that of all arts poetry is the most true and the
most necessary to men.
All learning, he pleads, and all culture begin with poetry. Philosophy,
religion, and history herself, speak through the lips of poetry. There
is indeed a sense in which poetry stands on higher ground than any
science. There is no science, not even metaphysics, the queen of all
sciences, that does not "build upon nature", and that is not, so far,
limited by the facts of nature. The poet alone is "not tied to any
such subjection"; he alone "freely ranges within the zodiac of his own
wit".
This, no doubt, is dangerous ground, and it is enforced by still more
dangerous illustrations. But Sidney at once guards himself by insisting,
as Plato had done before him, that the poet too is bound by laws which
he finds but does not make; they are, however, laws not of fact but
of thought, the laws of the idea--that is, of the inmost truth of
things, and of God.
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