FIRST RESPONSE PAPER

In addition to the reading assignment on Sir Philip Sidney, the first response paper is also due on Monday, September 27.

Feel free to give me your personal reactions to the Tudor poetry we?ve been reading, but I would particularly like to see you respond to one of the following questions:

1. In the introduction to the sixteenth century, the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature describe the contrived formality and artificiality of much Tudor poetry. But then they assert, "Such an emphasis on conspicuous pattern might seem to encourage an art as stiff as the starched ruffs that ladies and gentlemen wore around their necks, but the period's fascination with order was conjoined with a profound interest in persuasively conveying the movements of the mind and heart" (487). Do you agree? Do you find this to be true of the lyrics of Wyatt, Surrey, or Sidney?
2. In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney considers the history of English poetry up to his own time and finds little of value except Chaucer, Surrey, and some of Edmund Spenser's poems. (See p. 949; we'll read Spenser for Thursday.) Do Wyatt's and Surrey's poems seem to you to fit the ideals of poetry articulated in the Defense? Do Sidney's own poems successfully embody his ideals?
3. What is the status of poetry today? Is Sidney's defense of poetry relevant today, and might some of its arguments be effective in raising the status of poetry?