Philip Sidney Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Bailey

Critical Review by John Bailey

SOURCE: “Sir Philip Sidney,” in Poets and Poetry: Being Articles Reprinted from the Literary Supplement of ‘The Times’, by John Bailey, Clarendon Press, 1911, pp. 28–36.

In the following review of John Drinkwater's edition of The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1910, Bailey contends that Sidney marks an important stage in the development of English poetry after Chaucer; and Sidney was the first practitioner of a new beauty of language and mastery of rhythm.

Of all the English poets none has a fame so independent of his poetry as Sidney. Other poets—Milton, for instance, and Marvell—have played as great or a greater part in the life of their country; but their lives had not the grace, nor their deaths the glory, of the life and death of Sidney. His life was mainly, at least in appearance, the most futile and barren that...
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