Ans:
All forms of literature
blossomed and flourished luxuriantly in the Elizabethan age. But detractors and abusers of
poetry were also there. The leader of
these abusers and detractors was Stephen Gosson. Accompanied by his Puritan companions, Gosson
wrote a malicious treatise, "THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE"and mischievously dedicated it
to SIR PHILIP SYDNEY who was at the time the most
celebrated literary figure. Gosson had indicted poetry on four grounds:
1. Poetry
is the waste of time.
2. Poetry
is mother of lies.
3. It is
nurse of abuse.
4. Plato
had rightly banished the poets from his ideal world.
In his Apology for
Poetry Sidney defends poetry against all the charges made by
Gosson. Sidney does this in a very logical and scholarly way. He
takes up his defence point by point.
a)
Defending
poetry against the first
charge he says that man could
not employ his time more usefully than in poetry. He says that "no learning is
so good as that teacheth and moveth to virtue, and that none can both teach and
move thereto as much as poetry, then is the conclusion manifest that ink and
paper cannot be to more profitable purpose employed."
b) Sidney rebuts the [second] charge of lying levelled against it. He
who doesn't seek to establish any fact, past or present, can never lie.
The poet creates something by emotion or imagination against which no charge of
lying can be brought. The question of truth or falsehood would
arise only when a person insists on telling a fact. the poet does not do
so. He only probes in to the human heart
and pours out human feelings which can never be false. A true poet cannot
be a liar.
c) The third charge that "it abuses men's wit, training it
to wanton sinfulness and lustful love" may be partly justified, but for
this a particular poet may be blamed but not poetry. It's not poetry that
abuses man's wit, but man's wit that abuses poetry. ABUSE OF POETRY, according to Sidney, IS NOT THE
PROBLEM OF THE POETRY BUT OF THE POET.
d) The fourth charge that a great philosopher like Plato
proposed to banish the poets from his ideal Republic is also not tenable
because Plato sought to banish some bad poets of his times, and not poetry
itself. Plato himself believed that poetry is divinely inspired.
Sidney concludes, "So
as Plato banishing the abuse, not the THING, not banishing it, but giving due
honor unto it, shall be our patron and not adversary."
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