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First praised in Plato’s Republic as encompassing music—which was the closest of the arts to the soul, then excluded from the polis due to its excesses of imagination—poetry has always had an uneasy relationship to its truths. Sidney refers to the classical notion of poetry as a gift of the muses, and, as a “modern” poet, he leans toward a belief that the poet is responsible for the truths to be found in poetry. Even so, the sources of poetry’s magic are mysterious: craft and oratorical skill are not enough. Sidney’s mythic-sounding source of this magic still cannot be reduced to mere ability, for “art” waits upon wit along with imitation in the classical sense and exercise, or hard-earned skill. The formula mixes the metaphysical sources of great art with the more mundane and lodges them in the person of the poet, a concatenation that looks forward to Romanticism.
Sidney’s own major work, Astrophel and Stella—however much it may issue from intangible sources—arrives in a familiar form, an English version of the Italian sonnet, in an altered Petrarchan mode. The reader of this poem, in any era, approaches it as a continuation of known texts, even if he or she must seek some background knowledge as to the nature of those texts. Furthermore, in metrical poetry—something that is frequently misunderstood—the rhythmic pattern precedes the poem and acts to some extent as a musical score that instructs the reader on where to place stresses, etcetera. Of course, it may also be said that the poem conforms to a metrical pattern; however, given the many ways a line can be read, the preexistent pattern is the primary force dictating the reading. Sidney’s sonnets are therefore, for all their ambiguity, a very secure reading experience, which requires very little effort on the part of the reader to locate or invent the poem’s concerns, language, or structure. This kind of poem is an “object” in a much more convincing way than Williams’ “This Is Just to Say,” because it has many indisputable characteristics and connections to other objects. Assuming the language of the medieval “nominalist vs. realist” debate (later taken on by Emerson), the criterion for the “thingness” of an object (for a realist) is its possession of the characteristics specific to whatever thing it is.