Beneath the Skin: George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney and the Experience of English Poetry

Abstract

George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) was the first English literary-critical treatise fully to articulate the relationship between poetry and feeling. The Arte is at once an appraisal of the present state of English versification, an encyclopaedia of literary techniques, and a defence of poetry written in English. It is also a conduct book, for Puttenham was committed to the idea that good habits of reading fostered self-mastery among aristocratic gentlemen and believed firmly in the transformative power of literature, especially its facility to stimulate the minds and bodies of those who produced and encountered it. Like other Renaissance literary theorists, Puttenham drew from classical writers, including Plutarch, a belief that poetry could change people for the better.¹ But whereas Thomas Wright and Henry Crosse followed Plutarch in deploring the pleasure (hēdonē, volputas) associated with reading poetry, Puttenham explored the possibility that the sensations involved in reading and writing, including delight, could contribute in important ways to a distinctively English poetics. I argue here that Puttenham formulated a new aesthetic vocabulary in The Arte in order to describe the experience of being moved, stirred or enraptured by poetry; and that such experience was linked to the integrity, honour and self-government of English gentlemen.