Examples Of Poesie In The Arcadia

How consistent is Sidney’s practice of ‘poesie’ in the Arcadia(s) with the theory outlined in the Defense?

Since Plato, the social costs and benefits of poetry have been hotly debated. Although Plato chose to banish poets from his Republic for being a corrupting influence in an orderly and just society, he is well known as a great lover of Homer, and indeed consistently uses examples from Homer to illuminate arguments in the dialogues. The debate was similarly double-edged and ambivalent in the English Renaissance. In his tract on education The Schoolmaster (1570), Roger Ascham complained of the corruption of the youth of England by Continental literary imports. He famously maintained that works such as Morte d’Arthur encouraged “bold
Spenser recorded in a letter that Sidney scorned the dedication and the work, and Sidney specifically refutes Gosson 's argument that poetry is the "mother of lies"4 by saying that the poet is the least of all liars as "he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth5. However, Apology and School of Abuse are not so diametrically opposed in argument as it is often presumed, for example, when he concludes an argument by saying that it is “not to say that poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry”6, he echoes Gosson, and emphasises a core Christian belief in the erected wit and fallen will of the human soul. Sidney tries to persuade the reader that poetry, in its proper form, does have moral and didactic qualities superior to any other form of discourse in its capacity to both “delight and teach”7, and thus realign the will. He flatly denies that poetry in itself is pernicious, arguing, “Poesy must not be drawn by the ears; it must be gently led, or rather it must lead”8, suggesting that poetry “must not be drawn” for purely aesthetic or pleasurable reasons, but must be consciously “led” so as to express desirable opinions, and that by divine inspiration alone “it must lead” to desirable behaviour.
Pyrocles uses Orphic powers to quell the rebellious mob that attacks Basilius ' lodge, and Apollo plays a key role in the story, more particularly his oracle at Delphi, as the source of the prophecy that acts as a stimulus to the central events of the plot: the removal of Basilius and his family to the sequestered regions of the "desert". In the Apology, Sidney reminds the reader of the venerable names the ancient Greeks and Romans gave to poets, that of "poet" or maker and of vates or prophet, respectively. Shakespeare would use a similar device in the prophecy of the wyrd sisters in Macbeth, where the ambiguous prophecies which seemed auspicious to Macbeth turned out to be his doom, which would not have come to pass had it not been for the resulting hubris with which the prophecies endowed him. In the Arcadia, on the other hand, the prophecy appears at first to be inauspicious, hinting at the disintegration of Basilius ' family unit, but in fact it leads to a happy ending, which, again, would not have occurred had not the prophecy engendered fear in Basilius in the first place. Nonetheless, in both these situations, the prophecies, which are related in verse and can be equated to literature in general, whilst appearing to be of doubtful worth, and ambiguous, and