Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), English poet, courtier, and soldier, who in life was a model of the ideal Renaissance gentleman, and whose devotion to poetry served as an inspiration for the future of English verse.

Sidney was born in Penshurst, Kent, and was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford. A favorite of Elizabeth I, he was sent on several diplomatic missions. He retired from court for a time after incurring the queen's displeasure, but in 1583 was restored to favor and knighted. In 1585 he was appointed governor of Vlissingen in the Netherlands, and in 1586 he joined an expedition sent to aid the Netherlands against Spain. Sidney died of wounds received in a raid on a Spanish convoy at Zutphen in the Netherlands.

None of Sidney's works was published during his lifetime; many of them, however, circulated in manuscript. The best known are Astrophel and Stella (1591), a sequence of 108 sonnets celebrating a hopeless love affair, and Arcadia (1590), a pastoral romance in verse linked by prose passages; the first considerable work in English in this form, it became a model for later pastoral poetry. Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595; known in a slightly different version as An Apologie for Poetrie, also 1595) was a prose essay that described the nature of poetry and defended it against Puritan objections to imaginative literature.