In Praise of Useless Poetry

What if all we thought we knew about Philip Sidney, literature, and the good life was wrong, and what he is actually doing in his Defence of Poesy is to make a case, however implicit, for a poetics of uselessness, waste, corruption, and pleasure? L’art pour l’art 250 years before nineteenth-century bohemians, and a reaction to social realism? If this sounds challenging, that is exactly what Catherine Bates intends in her book on Sidney’s failure to defend poetry. While peddling the humanist justification for reading (the advancement of learning, and the teaching of morals), Sidney actually, she argues, explores the possibility of a literature that is anything but exemplary. This literature, and its concomitant aesthetics, kicks back against the pedagogical aspirations of poetry that, all too often, smack of the market-place and its hyper-accountability. Instead, Bates claims, Sidney is ‘straining towards’ (p. 137) a model of poetry that is more in line with his own writings in terms of its moral ambiguity and anything but idealist plots and personages. Close-reading the Defence line by line, Bates locates contradictions and inconsistencies of style in the split between what Sidney’s education and Tudor money culture compel him to say and what he really wants to say. There is, she explains, a roughness in both style and content of the text which is a product of a self-division in Sidney, manifesting in an ‘official’ voice which she calls the ‘speaker’, whose ‘promotion of idealist poetics . . . can hardly be taken as anything other than blatantly ideological’ (p. 118), and an ‘unofficial’ voice, Sidney himself, ‘self-doubting, self-contradicting’, a ‘creature who appears so often within the fictions that bear his signature’ (p. 10).

Bates takes Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse seriously and identifies three charges that Sidney assumes Gosson levels against poetry: that it is profitless; that it lies; that it abuses. These charges, be they true to Gosson or not, structure the Defence according to Bates, and hence also her book, whose flamboyant style and regressive folding in on itself imitate what it analyses. A defence of a defence, as it were. Only that the Defence is not one, because it would be seeking to defend the indefensible, namely profitless poetry, as Bates proposes in Part I. Although Sidney offers the period’s commonplace apology for studying literature (making readers in love with virtue and avoidant of vice), he actually balks at such a ‘bankable’ (p. 27) conception of poetry embroiled in emerging capitalist thought. By virtue of what Sidney fails to convince us of, the other kind of poetry, the one that Sidney secretly appreciates and not so secretly writes, is autonomous, perverse, queer. The second part engages with poetry’s propensity to be fictitious, that is, to lie. Bates here realigns the Defence as paradoxical praise rather than defence, and points towards its predecessors, including Utopia and The Praise of Folly. The last part of Bates’s book elaborates on Gosson’s attack that poetry abuses, and Sidney’s failing attempts at shoring up his inkling that Gosson might be right. Bates identifies two weak points in Sidney’s arguments, exploring how poetry is a drain on the coffers of the common-wealth, and how its wantonness threatens the state’s military safety. On Not Defending Poetry invites a radically new understanding of one of the foundational texts of the humanities. While it will certainly meet with (due) disagreement from the academic community, notably on its over-simplification of Renaissance attitudes towards reading and readership, Bates’s book offers counter-intuitive, and therefore intriguing, new approaches to a familiar text.

With the exception of the exordium, which she discusses towards the end of her book, Bates advances lineally through the Defence, sometimes line by line, picking apart Sidney’s turns and counter-turns. Tackling his fundamental claim, that poetry is profitable because it leads to learning, Bates asks why the supposedly...