SOURCE: “This Matching of Contraries: Calvinism and Courtly Philosophy in the Sidney Psalms,” in English Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1, February 1974, pp. 22–31.

In the following essay, Waller argues that the Sidney Psalter not only contains poetry that may be compared with that of the Metaphysical poets, but also is a reflection of important aspects in the literary and social ethos of the whole Sidney circle.

I

Since the publication of J. C. R. Rathmell's edition of the Sidney Psalms in 1963, there has been little evidence of the revaluation he hoped would follow. ‘When recognition is accorded to the Sidney Psalter’, wrote Dr. Rathmell, ‘the history of the metaphysical revival of our own time will have to be rewritten’. He observed further that the work was ‘virtually unknown even in academic circles … although it contains … some of the greatest poetry of the Elizabethan period’.¹ Dr. Rathmell's remarks obviously pointed towards a...