On Not Defending Poetry

Sidney's Defence of Poesy—the foundational text of English poetics—is generally taken to present a model of poetry as ideal: the poet depicts ideals of human conduct and readers are inspired to imitate them. Catherine Bates sets out to challenge this received view. Attending very closely to Sidney's text, she identifies within it a model of poetry that is markedly at variance from the one presumed, and shows Sidney's text to be feeling its way toward aquite different—indeed, a de-idealist—poetics. Following key theorists of the new economic criticism, On Not Defending Poetry shows how idealist poetics, like the idealist philosophy on which it draws, is complicit with the money form and with the specific ills that attend upon it: among them, commodification,fetishism, and the abuse of power. Against culturally approved models of poetry as profitable—as benefiting the individual and the state, as providing (in the form of intellectual, moral, and social capital) a quantifiable yield—the Defence reveals an unexpected counter-argument: one in which poetry is modelled, rather, as pure expenditure, a free gift, a net loss. Where a supposedly idealist Defence sits oddly with Sidney's literary writings—which depicthuman behaviour that is very far from ideal—a de-idealist Defence does not. In its radical reading of the Defence, this book thus makes a decisive intervention in the field of early modern studies, while raising larger questions about a culture determined to quantify the 'value' of the humanities and to defend the arts on those groundsalone.

...wittily titled and thoroughly contrary...This is a fine book....In one sense, Bates has written perhaps the first book in defence of Sidney's defence...Yet her ingenious buttressing of the Defence's weak spots comes under the guise of an attack...If this constitutes a paradox, it is...the kind of paradox that Sidney might, despite himself, have admired., On Not Defending Poetry also represents something of a theoretical departure for scholarship on Sidney's Defence....by adopting a 'deconstructionist approach' akin to that of Fredric Jameson, Bates steers away from the trend set by recent scholars who have adhered to the New Historicist methodologies pioneered by the likes of Stephen Greenblatt., Deeply learned ... an indispensable book.

Catherine Bates is Research Professor at the University of Warwick. She served as Head of Department from 2009 to 2014. She has been awarded a number of fellowships and prizes, including a Solmsen Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (OUP, 2013).