SOURCE: “Sir Philip Sidney and his Poetry,” in Elizabethan Poetry, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Edward Arnold Publishers, 1960, pp. 111–129.

In the following essay, Robertson presents an overview of Sidney's poetry in relation to his life and his intentions.

Nothing that happened later in his life meant so much to Fulke Greville as Sidney had done. In the long postscript he had to make do with his friend's literary remains. So Sidney's biography was written, and by emphasizing the preceptual value of the Arcadia, Greville tried to convey something of his ‘searching and judicious spirit’; but his dissatisfaction kept breaking through the praise. With one of the flashes of insight that light up his fuliginous prose, he throws out that, unlike many writers whose works are better than themselves, the Arcadia both in form and matter was inferior to Sidney's unbounded spirit. ‘His end was not...