Sir Philip Sidney
30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586
An English poet, courtier and soldier of the Elizabethan age, author of the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, the prose romance Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy, the first major work of literary criticism in English. He died at thirty-one of a wound received at the siege of Zutphen.
works
1595
The Defence of Poesy
contents →Sidney's defence of imaginative writing against its Puritan detractors, written around 1580 and published after his death in two editions of 1595, one titled The Defence of Poesie, the other An Apologie for Poetrie.