Sidney and Petrarch; Or, The Contemplation of Love

Sidney and Petrarch; Or, The Contemplation of Love

Tanto piu' di voi, quando piu' v'ama.

Petrarca.

The Renaissance reached its fulfilment in the sixteenth century. English, long neglected by the humanists' preoccupation with Greek and Latin, rose to a wholly new and conscious dignity as a medium of serious literary expression. That English should rise and attain the status of national language is not surprising in view of the fact that the spread of literacy and the introduction of printing, along with the increasingly strong nationalist feeling, did account for its consolidation.1

There was not only a steady progression towards developing a language of their own; English humanists also felt a peremptory need for constructing and shaping literary modes which were akin to their own set of values and culture. As The Norton Anthology of English Literature's introduction to the sixteenth century puts it: "Literary conventions challenged Elizabethan poets to find fit forms for their experiences, to show their learning and virtuosity by the ingenious elaboration of [...] well-known patterns, and to create from these patterns something fresh and new."2

Be it a pastoral poem or a sonnet, the Elizabethan poet would set out to follow the path of 'ingenious invention'. He would sometimes draw on the conventions and modes of the classics or, as the case may be, he could also seek out to emulate the patterns of foreign poets (mainly Italian and French), in order to recreate their poetic utterances.

In Phillip Sidney's sonnets, for instance, the old Petrarchan rhetoric is still at work. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is the first of the great sonnet cycles, which drew heavily upon the conventions established by Petrarch. The Cambridge History of English Literature says: "Some of [Watson's] successors were gifted with poetic powers to which he was a stranger, and interwove the borrowed conceits with individual feeling, which, at times, lifted their verse to the plane of genuine poetry."3 The quotation could be taken as an accurate reflection on Sidney's poetry, for he really undertook to work upon the already established literary modes and, by so doing, he did succeed in creating poetry of his own. For Sidney, thus, the Petrarchan conventions had to take on a wholly new meaning, if his poetry was to be both genuine and unique.