The Poet as Maker

Moral Didacticism and Prophetic Inspiration in Sidney and Shelley’s Platonic Conceptions of the Poet

Abstract

This paper explores the key argumentative strategies by which Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley deploy their conceptions of the poet in their prose works defending the place of poetry in English culture. Though Plantonists, both Sidney and Shelley ground their accounts of poetic creativity in the Aristotelian concept of the poet as maker. However, given the different historical, philosophical, and religious contexts which separate these two great theorists of poetic practice, what the poet makes in poetic creation diverges markedly for Sidney and Shelley. My discussion centers on exploring the precise nature of the faculty of imagination in the context of Sidney’s Renaissance understanding of human anthropology, and Shelley’s account of imagination in relation to Enlightenment concepts of modern science and philosophical pragmatism. Both Sidney and Shelley argue for poetry as originating in a divine source of power; this results in the ironic conclusion that Shelley proposes a more religious account of the poet than Sidney’s poet of Renaissance sensibility.