Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie: Edited With an Introduction and Notes
This noble little treatise well deserves more attention than it appears to have received from those who regulate the courses of study in our systems of secondary and advanced education for to all who regard poetry as it too generally is regarded in modern times it must come as a revelation. Most lucidly and most persuasively it explains and vindicates the claims of poetry to the place it held among the Ancients, to the place it held when Aristophanes could say that boys have the schoolmaster to teach them, but when they grow up the poets are their teachers. So completely has poetry come to be dissociated from its true functions that such a conception of its edu cational importance sounds now like paradox; it is not paradox but truism, as Sidney here demonstrates. A better introduction to the study of poetry could scarcely be conceived, for not only does it put poetry in its proper place as an instrument of education, but it deals with it generally as only a poet himself could deal with it, with illumining insight, with most inspiring enthusiasm. As it is here that the treatise is most precious and furthering to students, it is here, and here only, that stress should be laid in dealing with it as a subject of teaching and exami nation; with its innumerable references to obscure and now forgotten writers and writings it is not desirable that students, and young students especially, should be required to load their memories. What they are expected to retainof such minutiae should be reduced to a minimum. A judicious teacher will have no difficulty in distinguishing between what ought to be remembered and what may profitably be forgotten. With this object and for this reason the Notes dealing with these minor literary and biographical particulars have been made as succinct as possible, and the same applies to the philological notes. To Professor Gregory Smith I am obliged for per mission to use his text of the Apologie in his Elizabethan Critical Essays as the basis of the text here printed; but I have not followed him in certain re-arrangements of paragraphs, and I have modified the punctuation. The only important deviation from the original texts has been the substitution of correct for incorrect spelling in the case of proper names. I have also to thank Mr. Michael Macmillan for the assistance he has given me in writing the notes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
