Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Sir Philip Sidney: “huge desyre”
- 2 John Donne: “Defects of lonelinesse”
- 3 John Donne: “the Holy Ghost is amorous in his Metaphors”
- 4 George Herbert: “the best love”
- 5 Richard Crashaw: “love's delicious Fire”
- 6 Thomas Carew: “fresh invention”
- 7 John Milton: “Because wee freely love”
- 8 John Milton: “Haile wedded Love”
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
1 - Sir Philip Sidney: “huge desyre”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Sir Philip Sidney: “huge desyre”
- 2 John Donne: “Defects of lonelinesse”
- 3 John Donne: “the Holy Ghost is amorous in his Metaphors”
- 4 George Herbert: “the best love”
- 5 Richard Crashaw: “love's delicious Fire”
- 6 Thomas Carew: “fresh invention”
- 7 John Milton: “Because wee freely love”
- 8 John Milton: “Haile wedded Love”
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
If one had to choose a single word to sum up Sir Philip Sidney, that word might well be “desire.” In his life, he was the very knight of desire; in his writing, the very poet of desire. In love and politics alike, desire was the pervasive driving force behind his thoughts and actions. The strong presence of this underlying truth of feeling was clear enough to David Kalstone in 1965, when he published what is still among the best close readings of Astrophil and Stella and of what he calls its “Petrarchan vision.” “The sonnet sequence allows Sidney to dramatize from yet another point of view the lofty aims of the lover and the defeats imposed by desire.” A. C. Hamilton points out that before Astrophil and Stella courtly and Petrarchan love sequences typically end either in retraction or in transcendence. By persisting in desire to its fruitlessly bitter end, Sidney's Astrophil represents a radical departure “from the ending of any earlier sonnet sequence.” One may agree yet add that in his bleak ending Sidney simply takes the essence of Petrarchism to its logical conclusion, and so to destruction. Above all, Petrarchism is a strong poetics of desire, of terrible longing for the absent and unobtainable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Reinvention of LovePoetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton, pp. 12 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993