Philip Sidney

Philip Sidney was the model of the Elizabethan courtier, soldier, diplomat and poet, nephew of Leicester, who died at thirty-one of a wound at Zutphen, giving his water bottle, the story goes, to a dying soldier whose need was greater. He published nothing; Astrophil and Stella, the first English sonnet sequence, the Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy all appeared after his death. The Defence, answering a Puritan attack on the stage, argues that the poet, who delivers a golden world where nature’s is brazen, teaches better than the philosopher or historian, and it is the first work of English literary criticism.