Chapter 2

Invention

Philip Sidney’s “Fear of Maybe”

The most influential sonnet sequence of the Elizabethan era begins with a scene of writing:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain:

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know;

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;

 I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,

Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:

Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain.

 But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;

Invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows;

And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.

Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

“Fool,” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”

(A&S, 153, 1.1–14)¹

Sir Philip Sidney’s alter ego, like the elder brothers in Gascoigne’s The Glasse of Governement, is an aspiring poet, and he imagines himself as a schoolboy with an itch to turn truant. Inspired by his love for Stella to write a poem, Astrophil resorts to a skill presumably acquired in a humanist schoolroom: emulating other authors.² When he sifts through the books on his shelf, the barren terrain of his “sunburnt brain” manages to sprout new life.³ Reading catalyzes his imagination, and sometimes a seemingly potent phrase stamps and rears in his mind like an untamed horse. Finding no discipline or guidance, no “stay,” to manage this surprise, though, these words find that they have nowhere to go. Three times over the course of the sonnet, Sidney uses the same word—invention—to name three seemingly distinct aspects of Astrophil’s writing process. It appears as something a poet might seek in others’ work (“inventions fine”), something that might discipline racing thoughts (“invention’s stay”), and something that shirks both study and discipline to pursue its own inclinations (“Invention, nature’s child”). As Astrophil is pulled both toward the schoolroom and its books and away from it, Sidney’s poem characterizes invention—the beginning of composition—as akin to the “throes” of a protracted pregnancy. This condition persists until his muse speaks up and instructs him to let his own heart be his example.

Astrophil and Stella (ca. 1581, first printed in 1591) presents poetic invention as a confused and “halting” enterprise—a depiction that, I argue, we may join with Gascoigne’s “quick capacity” to advance a view of poesy as a mode of critical reflection and philosophical reexamination. As discussed in the previous chapter, invention was the first phase of rhetorical composition, and in the humanist schoolroom it primarily consisted of discovering arguments for use in a debate. By the late sixteenth century, invention was taught in the manner depicted in Gascoigne’s Glasse: as an exercise in compilation and emulation following the model of textual authorities. This approach was symptomatic of an increased emphasis on treating rhetoric as a means of conflating decorous obedience with eloquence. While early humanists who adapted the five “offices” of Ciceronian classical rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio/actio) into neo-Latin treatises emphasized the interrelations between rhetoric and dialectic, thereby presenting rhetoric as both a technical and philosophical practice, the outsize emphasis these treatises placed on elocutio precipitated a severing of style from substance. Erasmus’s De copia, with its plenitude of stylistic precepts and examples, became the core text of Renaissance rhetorical practice, and ultimately charted a trajectory that would see Peter Ramus influentially allocating inventio and dispositio to dialectic and leaving just elocutio and pronuntiatio to the domain of rhetoric.⁴ When Sidney was writing Astrophil and Stella in the early 1580s, read against this context, the connotations of “invention” had begun to shift, unsettled by a deepening affiliation between rhetoric and imitation. As more poets began questioning how to translate inspiration into verses worthy of attention, the question of how to begin was left unresolved even by treatises like Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes, which admitted that it could offer only examples rather than concrete guidelines for invention.

The previous chapter concluded by heeding Gascoigne’s warning and emphasizing how choice and lenience were necessary components of early modern poetic endeavor. In the reflection that followed, I proposed that these principles might inform the writing pedagogy of the modern literature classroom. With Sidney’s help, in this chapter I complicate these lessons by exploring early modern poetry’s preoccupation with how lenience decoupled from experiences of difficulty proves just as pedagogically irresponsible as overly rigid rules.

Posing the problem of how to proceed with invention—how to start writing a poem—the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella arrives at what seems like a solution: looking in one’s heart. One way to read this solution is as documenting a shift in approaches to writing from careful emulation to free expression, foreshadowing a rupture between imitative rhetorical composition and “original” poesy. To modern writing teachers, Astrophil’s decision sounds like it promotes what compositionists call the “expressivist” paradigm of writing instruction, a paradigm that manifests most concretely in the form of free-writing exercises. Yet this rift between rhetoric and poetics, or between emulation and expression—ramified in the modern academy as the disciplinary separation of composition, literary criticism, and creative writing—would have been perplexing to Elizabethan humanists like Astrophil and his author. The humanist schoolboy might have grown frustrated by rhetoric’s rigorous protocols, but he could not help but be influenced by them. Recognizing this interplay between freedom and responsibility, Ben Jonson argued that poets must not be afraid of “steering out of [their] sail” if “a fair gale of wind” favors them: “For all that we invent doth please us in the conception, or birth, or else we would never set it down.” He quickly hastens to add, however, that a poet out at sea must nevertheless practice a caution armed with the judgment acquired through rigorous rhetorical training: “[T]he safest is to return to our judgement, and handle over again those things, the easiness of which might make them justly suspected.”⁵

Locating poetic composition within a scene populated both by respect for “others’ books” and by the recklessness of a “truant pen,” Sidney renders poetic invention as being in perpetual conflict with regulation and instruction. If the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella appears to prize invention as “nature’s child,” ungoverned and ungovernable by external pressures, the second sonnet might be read as a tacit rebuttal of this view. In it, Astrophil concludes that his craft is fundamentally delusional: “I call it praise to suffer tyranny; / And now employ the remnant of my wit / To make myself believe that all is well, / While with a feeling skill I paint my hell” (A&S, 153, 2.11–14). The third sonnet veers back toward a defense of Astrophil’s project, rejecting the poetics of “Pindar’s apes” (A&S, 153–54, 3.3) to assert that instead of copying familiar figures, he will read only “Stella’s face” and copy “what in her nature writes” (A&S, 153–54, 3.12–14). Rather than suggesting that he can invent a poem simply by “looking in his heart,” Astrophil in this way grants Stella’s face the authority he would otherwise have sought in “others’ leaves.” The fourth sonnet again recognizes that this approach may leave the poet vulnerable to sin and confusion; finding himself prioritizing Stella’s face over moral authorities, Astrophil opens by asking “Virtue” to let him “take some rest” and to return to “Churches or schools” so as not to intervene even if “vain love have [his] simple soul oppressed” (A&S, 154, 4.1–6). As he swings back and forth between shame and pride throughout the remainder of the sequence, Astrophil acknowledges that he risks sabotaging his reputation by constructing a false deity while also acknowledging that he cannot help himself in his idolatry. This experience resembles one that Sidney himself confessed to having: in a letter to his sister Mary regarding his first poetic masterpiece, the Arcadia, he described the work as a “child, which I am loath to father” and ventriloquized his own father figures by renouncing his “young head” as “not so well stayed as I would it were (and shall be when God will).” Yet even as he confessed his shame, he admitted that if the “fancies” in his head had not “been in some way delivered,” they “would have grown a monster” and he would have been “more sorie … that they came in, than that they gat out.”⁶

True poetic invention, as Sidney came to depict it, was a necessarily difficult process characterized by doubt, hesitation, and reflection. While sonnet 1 of Astrophil and Stella opens with a poet resolved to trust his own instincts, the remainder of the sequence and his landmark The Defence of Poesy (1581) reveal Sidney to be a member of what Georgia Brown has called the “generation of shame.” An offshoot of Helgerson’s Elizabethan prodigals, the generation of shame was a group of writers who exploited their own feelings of affective ambivalence about poetry to “redefine literary activity as an alternative epistemological process, one that is no longer justified by reference to privileged modes of thought and the privileged modes of rationality.”⁷ By recognizing the inherent shamefulness and triviality of their poetic endeavors, these poets—with Sidney as their most prominent example—foregrounded the ways in which the shameful and trivial may be understood not as hindrances to thought but as enablers of it. Sidney eventually became “a Daedalus to his countrymen,” William Ringler suggests, of the very sort Sidney himself cites in his Defence of Poesy: a guide who could “teach [others] rules of right writing, and to provide them with models to follow.”⁸ I propose that the model Sidney offered paradoxically challenged a pedagogy rooted in obedience to models.

The first section of this chapter locates experiences of doubt at the heart of Sidney’s dissatisfied appraisal of the paradigm of invention afforded to Elizabethan schoolboys: forensic rhetoric, the sort of rhetorical argument practiced in courts of law to resolve disputes. Perceiving limitations in stasis theory, the bedrock method of this paradigm—a systematic and rule-bound method of resolving disputes by deciding on a specific question up for debate—Sidney sought to place poetic invention beyond the complete grasp of method. While he entertained modes of invention rooted in kairos—which licensed open-ended attentiveness to occasion and audience—the poetics he envisioned were nevertheless committed to the cautious exercise of judgment. His ambivalence about whether poets should be bound or free placed invention at an apex of rhetorical perplexity: aporia, at which orators “hesitate on both sides of a question.”⁹Connecting aporia to the more mundane experience we today call “writer’s block,” the first section sees Sidney dramatizing the conditions that may lead a poet to self-silencing. In the chapter’s second section, I find Sidney depicting Astrophil resolving his blockage via an illusion of presumed mastery. As Astrophil seems to arrive at a solution to his self-doubts in poems such as Sonnet 50 and Sonnet 74, however, I interrogate this solution by resituating it within a broader trajectory extending from Sidney’s earliest poems to the end of Astrophil and Stella. This broader trajectory reveals Astrophil’s fantasy of expressivity to be just as impotent as the frustrated method with which he begins the sequence. The absence of easy solutions, I argue, was foundational to Sidney’s conception of poetic invention throughout his career.

Reflecting on Sidney’s example, following this chapter’s conclusion I sketch a pedagogy of literary criticism that embraces as a goal the cultivation of doubt and hesitation. While students in literature classes are not challenged to become poets, they are asked to invent arguments rooted in their careful study of texts. Confronted by teachers with seemingly authoritative insight into textual meaning, they are often shielded from the discomfiting reality that making critical meaning out of literary encounters often involves a lot of trial and error. The poetics of discomposition envisioned by Sidney, I propose, can lead us to pedagogical practices that communicate the differences between choices, obligations, and impulses. I propose that as teachers we must develop strategies for laying bare how experiences of hesitation betoken an exposure to genuine choices and how frustration signals an encounter with a problem worth slowing down to solve. Drawing on studies of the invention strategies of literary critics as well as cautionary examples from writing teachers, I envision ways that the early modern literature classroom may help students grow comfortable with experiences of self-doubt by acknowledging, in theory and in practice, how inventing an argument is often quite difficult, risky, and perhaps even fruitlessly confusing work.

With Wit My Wit Is Marred

While invention took a subordinate role to style in the Tudor grammar school, the meaning of “invention” itself also gradually shifted from “discovery” to “conception” over the course of the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, it took on its more modern connotation of “an original contrivance or production of a new method or means of doing something.”¹⁰ The former meaning of invention, “discovery,” aligned it primarily with the juridical posture of forensic rhetoric and the compositional methods rooted in appeals to authoritative arguments. Roland Greene explains that these methods posit “a more or less inert object, a concessionary (if not a superstitious) approach to textual authority, and a temporal project that brings matter out of the past into the present.” The bedrock of legal argumentation, invention as discovery studied the facts on the ground and considered them in light of revered precedents. By contrast, Greene suggests, the emerging view of invention as conception aligned the term more closely with “a lively, sometimes ineffable object, a greater degree of independence from past authorities, and a project that creates fictions in the present destined to be encountered in the future.”¹¹

Rather than constraining itself to the facts on the ground or the books on the shelf, invention as conception turned a poet’s present experience into a platform for imagining what might be instead. This liveliness arose, in part, through invention’s affiliation with dialectical reasoning. After the seventeenth century, an invention was a new thing rather than something constructed largely via a process of studying others’ texts. Philip Sidney preceded this transformation; in effect, he witnessed it happening. Caught Janus-faced in a movement where invention was affiliated with both past and future, he came to apprehend it both as a practice overseen by “step-dame study” and as something for which it was originally conceived by classical rhetoricians: a philosophical practice oriented toward new questions and new ideas. Witnessing rhetorical practice abandoning the latter mode of invention as central to its method, Sidney found in poetry a means of critiquing this dereliction of duty.

How did the rhetorical training of Elizabethan humanism prepare—or fail to prepare—poets for practicing invention? I approach this question by unpacking how Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Astrophil and Stella together respond to an occasion for rhetorical argumentation that arose in 1579, in the form of Stephen Gosson’s antipoetical treatise, The Schoole of Abuse. For reasons that remain unclear, Gosson, a reformed poet and playwright, dedicated the treatise to Sidney, perhaps unaware that the young nobleman had been experimenting with vernacular poetry as an outlet for his otherwise sidelined courtly talents.¹² Having already authored a masque for Queen Elizabeth I, Sidney had also begun composing the Arcadia to entertain his sister Mary while on leave from court.¹³ It is as a result unsurprising that, as Edmund Spenser reported, Gosson was “for hys labor scorned” by the young courtier.¹⁴ What is surprising, however, is that in Defence, Sidney would concede many arguments made by antipoetical writers like Gosson. He admits that poetry could be and often is a “nurse of abuse” (234) that “abuseth men’s wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love” (236), and also that much of the poetry written by his countrymen was frivolously undertaken by “base men with servile wits” (241). Such concessions are representative of a pattern that readers have frequently noticed, wherein Defence struggles to develop a firm ground from which to cogently counterpoint antipoetical claims.¹⁵ Catherine Bates characterizes it as “a text terminally in conflict with itself” because an “unofficial voice” continually undermines Sidney’s “official” arguments for poetry’s profitability, many of which are themselves derivative and drawn from classical and continental writers.¹⁶ Through the “hesitancies and qualifications” it injects into the prose, this unofficial voice exposes the speaker of Defence as a “self-doubting, self-contradicting, and self-divided creature.”¹⁷ Gosson may have impudently brought a debate to Sidney’s doorstep, but it seems as if Sidney dismissed Gosson and staged the debate entirely with himself.

Recognizing his situation as a moment of conflict between competing disputants—those who would condemn poetry for its sins and those who might defend it for its virtues—Sidney would have regarded the occasion as an incitement to invention. In disputes involving an accuser and a defender (known to rhetoricians as forensic or judicial arguments), invention proceeded by the disputants first deciding on the exact point of contention, a point known to rhetoricians as stasis: the “standstill” or “halt” between conflicting accounts.¹⁸ Variously rendered as status, basis, or constitutio, stasis named the place from which each disputant would construct his argument. Stasis theory was first outlined in ancient Greece by Hermagoras of Temnos and formalized as a procession of questions: “Is there a problem? What is the essence of the problem? How serious is the problem from the standpoint of its non-essential attributes and attendant circumstances? Should there be any formal action on the problem (and, if so, should it be undertaken by this particular agency)?”¹⁹

Once the disputants identified the specific question about which they disagreed, they would have a warrant for a specific line of questioning. These lines were housed under the “topics” of invention: for example, if the accusation is that a theft has occurred and the disputants disagree on whether or not the actions constituted theft (a stasis rooted in definition), the topics direct them to inquire into the legal definition of theft before comparing the specific circumstances of the crime to that definition.²⁰ Derived from the Greek topoi limned by Aristotle—the “turns” or “places” from which an argument might proceed—the topics of invention corresponded, Corbett suggests, to “how the human mind thinks” by abstracting, generalizing, and classifying the supposedly natural “tendencies” of cognition.²¹ As rhetorical pedagogy became increasingly formalized over centuries, the topoi became the content-based Latin loci, which later became “the inspiration for the so-called commonplace books that Renaissance schoolboys were later required to keep.”²² Janice Lauer explains that once the “topics” became textually “bound” in Latin textbooks like the widely used Rhetorica ad Herennium, they began “losing their power as a set of investigative heuristics for the process of knowledge creation or inquiry” and “became a search for material to develop parts of the text.”²³ The kind of composition we saw Gnomaticus and the pious younger brothers practice in the previous chapter, which consisted of compiling and reciting authoritative platitudes, can be traced to this method of invention via textual accretion.

When accosted with the assertion that poetry was guilty of crimes and should be banished, then, Sidney’s first problem was that the forensic arguments against it were formidable. Poetry did, he had to concede, contribute to idleness, lasciviousness, and indecorousness. Moreover, authorities as revered as Plato had “banished [poets] out of his commonwealth,” and such a contention would ostensibly leave any defender of poetry without much recourse for proving its fundamental honorableness. His response to this latter argument points out that “of all philosophers” Plato was “the most poetical,” and that philosophy picks its “true points of knowledge” out of the “sweet mysteries of poetry” (238). The primary difference, he suggests, between poetry and philosophy is that the philosophers put knowledge “in method” and make of it “a school-art” whereas poets have opted to “teach by a divine delightfulness” (238) rather than any set method. What might seem like a “truant,” Sidney figures as a prophet.

This move of distinguishing poetry via its resistance to “school-arts” reverberates throughout Defence, and is anticipated by the very first move Sidney makes in his argument. Called to defend poetry against rhetorical charges of abuse by rhetoricians, he veers into a parody of rhetorical argumentation itself: his speaker describes the florid expostulations about horsemanship by one “John Pietro Pugliano” as threatening to persuade the poet to have “wished [himself] a horse” (212). In this jocular mood, Sidney offers the context that he had been “provoked to say something unto you in the defense of that my unelected vocation” and modestly offers to make a “pitiful defense of poor poetry” by compiling “some more available proofs” (212). Poetry would need someone to make a rhetorical defense of it, he observes, because a rhetorician “is by no man barred of his deserved credit” while a poet “has had even the names of philosophers used to the defacing of it” (212). He makes clear that he is assuming the role of defense attorney despite knowing that taking up this case means beginning at a disadvantage. As a result, part of the defense Sidney ends up making is an argument against the methods of rhetorical argumentation.

Like philosophers, Sidney suggests, rhetoricians argue by “considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade” and so “thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter” (216). The “circle of a question” binds the disputants to contend only through established protocols of proof and evidence; thus, Sidney invokes stasis theory, which was designed specifically to light on a single question around which disputants might frame their arguments. Proceeding from this question, debaters may point to concrete evidence or, worse, to commonplace answers, which, Sidney suggests, restricts their ability to imagine new answers or even new questions. Poets need not limit their compositions to disputes, evidence, or “artificial rules”; they are not circumscribed, it seems, by anything. They are the prophets, and the tricksters, who may challenge evidence’s claims to compel a reconsideration of opinion. Thus, Sidney sets his poet loose, “lifted up with the vigor of his own invention” to a place from whence he might “grow in effect another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth fort, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature” (216). This poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lies,” and so “never makes any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes” (235). Concomitantly, this poet does not cite “authorities of other histories” and does not labor “to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be” (235). This critique of resorting to commonplaces or precedents in practicing invention is corroborated by Sidney’s critique of many of his poetic contemporaries: he complains that many of them, writing “under the banner of unresistable love,” were formulaically issuing verses: “[S]o coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings [and] caught up certain swelling phrases” (246). The worst kind of poetry clumsily compiles stale figures; it is the license to fabricate new inventions out of whole cloth, Sidney stresses, that makes poets uniquely capable of persuading otherwise unwilling minds to noble aspirations.

Despite granting the “divine gift” of poetry only to an elect few, Sidney recognizes that “as the fertilest ground must be manured, so must the highest-flying wit have a Daedalus to guide him.”²⁴ He knew that too many English poets believed themselves to be divinely inspired and that, left unchecked, these “paper-blurrers” (241) would reduce Elizabethan literary culture to an artless heap. Even those with innate talent might make a mess of their gifts, and so would need a teacher to set them straight:

That Daedalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise indeed we do, but that very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known; and so is our brain delivered of much matter which never was begotten by knowledge. For there being two principal parts, matter to be expressed by words and words to express the matter, in neither we use art or imitation rightly. (242)

Lacking any other pedagogical framework, what Sidney proposes as a model for proceeding “rightly” looks almost exactly like the study of rhetorical composition he elsewhere appears to satirize. He alludes here to the widely used grammar school textbook Rhetorica ad Herennium, which recommends that students engage in “Theory, Imitation, and Practice” (arte, imitatione, exercitatione).²⁵ By reaffirming these foundational rhetorical principles, Sidney implies that English poets have been engaging in “exercise” without concern for either art or imitation. Even when imitation is undertaken, they do it without “poetical sinews” (243), so that if someone put their verses “in prose, and then ask the meaning,” it would appear only as a “confused mass of words” (243) instead of coherent ideas marshaled into an “assured rank” (242).²⁶ Observing that all poets need something to write about (“matter to be expressed by words”) and a way to go about writing it (“words to express the matter”), with the advice above Sidney appears to emphasize only the words and to sidestep the matter.

Where does Sidney think poets get the matter they might choose to write about? He resists offering a concrete answer, locating the poet’s practice within “the zodiac of his own wits” and therefore “not enclosed within the narrow warrant of [nature’s] gifts” (216). His conviction in poets’ freedom to practice their own inventions leads him to set aside “divine poets” like the biblical David as well as “philosophical” poets, who are “wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject” and so do not consider “the course of [their] own invention” (218).²⁷ These poets do not have to come up with what to write about, because either divine inspiration or a proposed theme supplies it to them. Sidney’s primary concern for the majority of Defence, he explains, is the third sort of poet, the “right poets” who invent on their own and have “no law but wit” (218). Such poets may “borrow nothing of what is, hath bin, or shall be,” he says, “but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be” (218). Wherever poets get their ideas, he insists, it is not rooted in the past, or the factual, or even the plausible. Poetic imagination, and its capacity for constructing alternate futures and novel possibilities, emerges as essential to the aspect of rhetorical invention that could not be systematized, reduced to a method, and taught.

Decoupling poesy from the constraints of method exposes Sidney’s argument for radical license to charges that poetry is uncontrolled and dangerous.²⁸ How does one practice a “divine consideration of what may be and should be” without falling into presumptions that, if left unchecked, could lead poets to blasphemous, dangerous, frivolous, vain, or simply wrong ideas? To account for this, Sidney’s framing introduces a crucial caveat—“reined with learned discretion”—that yokes dreaming up “what may be” to the moral, rational, and ideological consideration of what “should be.” What “may” be is an unfettered imaginative exercise, but what “should” be entails persuasion, calculation, and ethical responsibility. The right use of poesy enlists both of these because it depends on propagation of a virtuous idea among those who may not already be receptive to it. When Sidney attributes the poetic skill to “that idea, or fore conceit of the work, and not in the work itself,” he makes clear that this idea cannot remain in the realm of the “wholly imaginative” (216). It is fully achieved by the “excellency” of its articulation, an excellency that hinges on readers seeing what the poet sees, and what the poet sees must necessarily be better than what already exists in nature—a “golden world” to nature’s “brazen” one (216). The poetic “idea” must in turn inspire readers to embrace that better version of reality as a prompt to future action. A poet thus works “not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright, why and how that maker made him” (216–17). The right poet’s excellency rests on a convergence of workmanship and readerly attentiveness; poetic invention, as Sidney describes it, can be perfected only if the world of readers “learn aright” why the poem was made in the way that it was.²⁹

This tacit emphasis on the audience’s response clarifies that for Sidney, poetic invention is exactly as Karen Burke Lefevre describes it: a “social act.”³⁰ As noted above, rhetorical invention via stasis emerged as a manner of resolving disputes, and to proceed it required the disputants to first agree about the question under dispute. The accuser might be trying to argue that poetry is a “nurse of abuse” while the defendant might be arguing that poetry’s social benefits outweigh its costs. These disputants would end up talking past one another, because they would be arguing from different premises and conjuring arguments in support of their positions without really acknowledging the other side. If invention is conceived not as an argument made in isolation, in preparation for a confrontation, but rather as the product of the confrontation, it comes closer to Lefevre’s “dynamic view of invention as the creation of something new—new for the individuals or groups who have not previously thought of it, or new in that it has not previously been conceived of by anyone at all.”³¹

As Thomas O. Sloane observes, the teaching of “topical” invention has long been prioritized over the crucial “controversial” dimension of stasis, in which “debate is the process that defines rhetorical thought” and “pro and con reasoning is the context within which the topics are to be used.”³² By forcing orators to imagine themselves as nimbly responsive to the best arguments that might be wielded against them, invention via stasis was meant to be an “analytical process.”³³ The most practical manifestation of this analytical process was arguing in utramque partem, or what in Greek was known as the use of dissoi logoi. While arguing on both sides was fundamental to the stasis-theory-inspired humanist classroom, the use of dissoi logoi began prior to the advent of stasis.³⁴ While stasis theory afforded both disputants instructions for preparing their arguments according to logical topics and commonplaces, dissoi logoi compelled orators to respond in real time to one another’s claims. As stasis became more formalized and embedded in textual study, the role of interlocutors was not to dynamically develop a new understanding, but to serve as opponents who might be defeated.

The dissoi logoi emerged because, according to Phillip Sipiora, the sophists held that “things exist in an uncertain, ultimately unknowable way” and so “we are compelled to maintain contrary perceptions, interpretations, and arguments.”³⁵ In response to this relativism, they championed a sort of thinking that demanded “a multiple awareness, an awareness at once cognizant of its own position and those positions opposing it,” as John Poulakos explains.³⁶ As part of this awareness, Poulakos continues, the sophists privileged the ability to “capitalize on opportune rhetorical moments,” or kairoi. From this sense of “the right time” emerged the concept of kairos, which names “one’s sense of timing and the will to invent”—a mode of invention rooted not in precedent but in anticipation.³⁷ Over time, Sipiora notes, kairos has become affiliated with a host of other concepts, such as “ ‘symmetry,’ ‘propriety,’ ‘occasion,’ ‘due measure,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘tact,’ ‘decorum,’ ‘convenience,’ ‘proportion,’ ‘fruit,’ ‘profit,’ and ‘wise moderation.’ ”³⁸ Kairos assumes that being attuned to the possibility of antithesis at all times promotes adaptation, improvisation, and a consciousness of one’s ethical commitments.³⁹ It was kairos that led rhetoricians to insist on exercitatio as a component of rhetorical training, to account for the fact that, as Sipiora puts it, “rhetorical theory cannot cast its net over the unforeseen, unpredictable, and uncontrollable moments.”⁴⁰ If, on the one hand, kairos names principles of appropriateness and proportion and helps orators “fit” their words to the present moment, on the other hand, according to Carolyn R. Miller, it also names “not the expected but its opposite: the uniquely timely, the spontaneous, the radically particular” and so “resists method, making rhetoric unteachable.”⁴¹ Rather than being attributable to forces beyond cognition, however, kairos emphasizes the rhetor’s capacities for observation, speculation, and attunement; rather than being inspired by the gods, moreover, kairos is animated by discursive exchange.⁴²

Together, stasis and kairos account for how, when speakers compose utterances, they inhabit a particular circumstance and regard the specific audience before them while also drawing on learned techniques to isolate and decide on what to say. Kairos leaves speakers open to the contingency and density of the present; stasis arms them with the linguistic resources and logical habits of mind they already possess. The collaboration of kairos and stasis describes the operations of an attention that resists lapsing into either preprogrammed routines or irrelevant trivialities—an invention that ranges while also remaining reined by learned discretion. Their collaboration also recognizes that the resources of the past may not be adequate for the future, that the practice of invention must proceed dialectically, probing after new knowledge by oscillating between different vantages. Thus, while the humanist schoolroom prioritized modes of composition relying on argument via stasis, the kairotic dimensions of invention, which could not be taught, found little explicit pedagogical representation. Schoolboys might have waged disputes, but, bound as they were to commonplaces and to the authority of the adjudicating schoolmaster, they were not necessarily taught how to consider their rivals’ arguments as prompts to improve upon their own.

In making the responsibility of “right poets” a capacity not only to “deliver forth” ideas excellently but to have those ideas propagate in the minds of readers, Sidney charges them with anticipating and counteracting readers’ resistance to their words. Poetry differs from other human sciences, he explains, because the poet “doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter it” (226). This high bar challenges poetry with being rhetorically successful, persuasive, and tempting—and makes a keen attentiveness to one’s audience and occasion part of the challenge. In this light, poetic invention becomes a practice of continual self-consciousness, and Sidney’s Defence ultimately suggests that the cultivation of such self-consciousness requires a reversal of the traditional functions of audience and author. Rather than criticizing and condemning, the readership he imagines for poetry becomes more generous, more receptive, more permissive—he imagines a readership that will “learn aright” why and how the poet had made the poem. At the same time, the right poets he imagines set aside their narcissism and instead become more rigorous and more critical of themselves. To promote this vision, he appeals to his countrymen to be less harsh toward their peers’ poetic offspring: he wants England to cease being “so hard a stepmother to poets” (240) and to stop offering only “a hard welcome” (241) to poetic endeavor. He also simultaneously cautions that “they that delight in poesy itself”—that is, aspiring poets—“should seek to know what they do and how they do” (242). Poets, Sidney advises, must become severe critics of their own work and must “look themselves in the unflattering glass of reason” (242) before assuming any value in their verses.

In Astrophil and Stella, the scene of writing becomes a perpetual struggle between the poet’s need to express and a fear of what others will think. Sidney knew that poetry had a dangerous edge, but he also felt that poesy’s virtues derived from the poet’s ability to set virtue and reason aside, at least temporarily. Though he cautioned, “[W]ith a sword thou may’st kill thy father,” he also conceded, “and with a sword thou may’st defend thy prince and country” (237). A newly conceived invention may become a benefit to society, but it may also threaten the very foundations of society. Analogizing poetry to such “martial sports” (A&S, 173–74, 53.1), Astrophil and Stella’s scenes of writing are preoccupied with poets at once presuming a powerful capacity to “conceive” and internalizing how this presumption exposes them to dangerous error. Sometimes Astrophil feels as if he has been struck by a flash of inspiration: “Stella behold, and then begin to endite” (A&S, 158–59, 15.14). Other times, he feels constrained, bottled up, and bound by fears of public humiliation: “My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toys” (A&S, 159–60, 18.9). Other times still, he feels simultaneously confident and impotent: “My words, I know, do well set forth my mind; / My mind bemoans his sense of inward smart; / Such smart may pity claim of any heart; / Her heart (sweet heart) is of no tiger’s kind: / And yet she hears, yet I no pity find, / But more I cry, less grace she doth impart” (A&S, 170, 44.1–6). Taken as a whole, the sequence does not allow Astrophil to settle on a poetic method.⁴³ Sonnet 34 addresses these concerns directly, throwing Astrophil into the conflict between an appeal for grace and the disgracefulness of poetry itself:

Come let me write, “And to what end?” To ease

 A burdened heart. “How can words ease, which are

 The glasses of thy daily vexing care?”

Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please.

“Art not ashamed to publish thy disease?”

 Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.

 “But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?”

Then be they close, and so none shall displease.

 “What idler thing, then speak and not be hard?”

What harder thing then smart, and not to speak?

Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is marred.

Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreak

 My harms on ink’s poor loss; perhaps some find

 Stella’s great powers, that so confuse my mind.

(A&S, 166, 34.1–14)

The cautionary admonitions of mentors and teachers—Sidney’s father, his mentor Hubert Languet, even critics like Gosson—reverberate in Astrophil’s mind and leave him discomposed. Poetry, they warn, is useless, idle, profitless.⁴⁴ He first replies to this inquisition by repeating the image of an irrepressible internal urge. To this, the voice in his head rejoins that his words are simply the “glasses of thy daily vexing care.” This both ventriloquizes the disdain of those who saw love poetry as narcissistic and affirms the idea that language is an impersonal system of articulation. To these contentions, Astrophil has another answer ready, remarking that drama, tension, and conflict—in this case, of the lover wrestling with passions—might still please audiences. This retort, one akin to the one in Sidney’s Defence that “those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles, unnatural monsters, are made in poetical imitation delightful” (227), recasts Astrophil’s writing as a public rather than a private affair.⁴⁵ Splitting the poet between self-therapy and the services he might render to the world, these lines redouble Astrophil’s conflicted energies. Expression may be profitable to him but profitless to the world. If his audience is the public, his censorious and rational conscience shifts its assault to argue that “wise men” will criticize it. When Astrophil replies that he will not publish them, his interlocutor again refutes him with the pointlessness of writing for no one.

The shame involved in writing, Elspeth Probyn suggests, makes writing about shame—as Sidney does throughout much of Astrophil and Stella—an inevitably self-reflexive process.⁴⁶ Shame arises “from a collision of bodies, ideas, history, and place,” and because of this, writing about shame while feeling shame about writing means documenting the collision from amid the wreckage. Astrophil and Stella begins with a poet “loving in truth” and hoping to equal this love in words, but by the fifth line, when he begins to seek “fit words,” it becomes clear that the subject of the sonnet is not the poet’s love but his own tormented writing process.⁴⁷ Probyn suggests that writing about shame makes the writer’s body a “battleground where ideas and experiences collide,” but that such collisions “sometimes … produce new visions of life”; Sidney, throughout Astrophil and Stella, makes these collisions the domain of poetic invention.⁴⁸ “The blush of having failed to connect with readers,” Probyn argues, “should compel any writer to return to the page with renewed desire to do better—to get better—at this task of communicating that some of us take on.”⁴⁹ Sidney’s defense of poesy, we might say, places a lot of trust in that “should.” “[P]oesy must not be drawn by the ears,” he cautions, “it must be gently led, or rather it must lead” (242). Doing the work of poesy will improve one’s poetic labors; the resistance offered during invention, like the friction of an argument, will make one’s own invention stronger.

Promoting self-consciousness while also offering specific instructions about what and what not to do leads Sidney to contradict himself throughout Defence. The qualifications and hesitations that infuse this text—evident even in the final quotation of the previous paragraph—partly reflect the limitations of invention through writing—that is, when one may argue only with oneself. Sidney debates with himself as to whether poets are divinely inspired or in need of concrete pedagogical guidance, but on the page, he can only ever offer his own voice. How can one make a case for poetry, Defence ultimately seems to suggest, without availing oneself of what poetry itself solicits from readers: their willingness to “learn aright” why this case was made and how? In an important reading, Ronald Levao sees its author playing “not only the rhetorician but the poet as well” in order to demonstrate rather than decide on the dilemmas that characterize defending poetry. Noting how Sidney’s discussion of poetic inspiration appears “deliberately tangled and ambivalent,” for example, Levao argues that Sidney “presents us with ‘something for everyone,’ aiming different claims at different readers, hoping that all will find something to serve as ‘an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention.’ ”⁵⁰ Defence thus performs its own poetic commitment to neither affirming nor denying anything; it presents readers with conflicting points that serve only to remind them of the dilemma of making a formal argument to defend something that evades formalization.

Picking up on the same strain of polyvocality, Catherine Bates identifies in the texture of Sidney’s prose “a resistance or irresolution of some kind” and through them discerns Sidney “groping towards a newer, more radical conception of poetry that is, for all that, very far from fully formed.”⁵¹ As Bates puts it, “The real argument of the Defence—what Sidney wants to say but dare not, or dare not openly, or has not yet found a means to say—is, in this text, still inhibited, still held back. The plea for a non-idealist, non-profitable, non-bankable model of poetry is still unsayable, and remains the unspoken, unofficial argument that has to be deduced, inferred, from the traces it leaves symptomatically on the page.”⁵² Readers must learn to read what Sidney cannot say, Bates suggests. They must invent their own argument for poetry based not on what he has already said, but on what he appears to have tried, and even failed, to say.

Without anyone with whom to converse, solitary writers must rely on their own inventive resources. The density of potential arguments against the inscription of another word—the nagging echo, “and to what end?”—is often enough to make such writers outwit themselves into not writing. As Mike Rose points out, many student writers experience such blockage because “(1) the rules by which they guide their composing processes are rigid, inappropriately invoked, or incorrect; (2) their assumptions about composing are misleading; (3) they edit too early in the composing process; (4) they lack appropriate planning and discourse strategies or rely on inflexible or inappropriate strategies; (5) they invoke conflicting rules, assumptions, plans, and strategies; and (6) they evaluate their writing with inappropriate criteria or criteria that are inadequately understood.”⁵³ Writer’s block manifests as a form of self-contradiction—literally, speaking against oneself to the point of total silencing.⁵⁴ In a psychological study, Jerome L. Singer and Michael V. Barrios observe that blocked writers “present themselves as worried, self-doubting, and highly constrained by rigid rules and standards for their work.” They “are less likely than nonblocked writers to report an attachment to their current professional roles and relationships,” “report lower levels of ambition,” and “also report more active disdain and dissatisfaction with colleagues and available role models.” Moreover, they “present an impression of holding on tightly to the uncomfortable status quo while simultaneously complaining about it.”⁵⁵

Compare these accounts of writer’s block with Edward Berry’s description of the conflicts that determined Philip Sidney’s upbringing: “[B]etween the humanistic idealization of public service and the actuality of life at court; between the Spartan study of Xenophon at Shrewsbury School and attendance on the queen in full regalia at Oxford; between the moral earnestness of Henry Sidney and the moral ambiguity of the earl of Leicester; between an educational system that valued poetry in the teaching, as a source of moral education, but dispraised it in the making, as a mere recreation for ladies.”⁵⁶ If he was ever actually blocked, Sidney endured and came to write about it. Seeing him in this light illuminates how even writing that seems inspired or produced by innate talent may be traced to experiences of dissatisfaction and hesitation. Throughout the sequence, but especially in Sonnet 34, Sidney depicts the poet writing while he doubts to write, hoping that perhaps readers might at least see something of his doubtfulness.

Kissing Fire

As the primary concern of Sonnet 34 is what Astrophil should do rather than what he has done, the argument it provokes requires deliberative— rather than forensic—invention. Like forensic oratory, deliberative rhetoric weighs questions on two sides; as Quentin Skinner explains, it aims to “persuade someone to act or refrain from acting in some particular way.”⁵⁷ According to Aristotle, deliberative oratory is “nobler” than forensic oratory because it is “worthier of a statesman” who has to address a general assembly about plans for the future. Though he remarks that “the method of public [deliberative] and forensic rhetoric is the same,” neither he nor any other classical rhetorician appears to have systematized deliberative rhetoric in the way Hermagoras and his followers developed stasis theory for forensic arguments.⁵⁸ Rhetorica ad Herennium enlists deliberative rhetoric for when “the question concerns a choice between two courses of action, or of the kind in which a choice among several is considered.” For one example, it entertains the question, “Does it seem better to destroy Carthage, or to leave her standing?”⁵⁹ To make such a case, the orator might take his advantage by appealing to either possibility, expediency or benefit, or honor.⁶⁰ In Sonnet 34, as Astrophil rebuffs the claims made by his conscience and as his conscience shifts the grounds of its own assault, it becomes clear that the polity that resides within him never reaches any kind of deliberative stasis. Whether the ends to which Astrophil hopes to write poetry are possible to achieve, whether they are expedient or beneficial, and whether they are honorable all remain frustratingly open questions. As a result, he casts a hope out to a future audience that may learn to read him aright: “perhaps some find / Stella’s great powers, that so confuse my mind.” The best his deliberation can offer is a rendering of his complexity and confusion—a rendering encapsulated in Astrophil’s “perhaps.”

When participants in a dispute do not listen to one another’s arguments, all involved may become irritated with themselves, with one another, with the topic of conversation. Words either recede into silence or rise to the level of drowning one another out, as neither party gives up any ground. When this happens—“when interlocutors can find no mutually acceptable solution to the problem they have engaged”—the result, Stephen Yarbrough explains, betokens a disagreement about the problem itself and, with it, a disagreement about the merits of any further debate. Resolving this irritation and changing someone’s mind requires that the participants maintain a baseline position of charity toward one another and reserve the ability to shift their own prevailing assumptions.⁶¹ To decide what should be done in response to a problem, the concerned parties need to at least agree about the problem itself; otherwise the result will inevitably be an impasse. Jacques Derrida affiliates this impasse with aporia—a state of “nonpassage” that “appears to block our way or to separate us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem, a project, or a projection” (emphasis in the original).⁶² Broadly speaking, aporia may be described as a systemic inconsistency; it is a site at which the commitments that inform thought or practice undermine themselves. For Aristotle, aporia names a logical knot that entangles “the divergent views which are held about the first principles” of an inquiry. These knots, because they arise from irreconcilable differences in the fundamental premises of an inquiry, provoke a “perplexity of the mind” like that of “people who do not know where they are going.”⁶³

Aporias are often the cruxes of Socratic dialogues, and in addition to indexing the real stakes of a discussion, they also precipitate experiences of frustration and aggravation in Socrates’s interlocutors.⁶⁴ As an instigator of and a response to apparent contradictions, over time aporia also began to function as a figure of confusion, in addition to a condition of it, and was deployed as the performance of humility. In early modernity, George Puttenham would define it as “the Doubtful, [so] called … because often we will seem to caste perils, and make doubts of things when by a Plaine manner of speech we might affirm or deny them.”⁶⁵ Upon encountering an aporia, or to make it seem as if an aporia existed, one might enlist the rhetorical figure of aporia to perform doubt.

The muddled relationship between rhetorical and philosophical irresolution, according to Jenny C. Mann, led deconstructionists like Derrida to identify aporia as “the site at which a text undermines its own philosophical structure by revealing the rhetorical nature of that structure.”⁶⁶ Evoking the terminology of stasis by describing aporia as a failure to “constitute a problem,” Derrida locates it in an instructive distinction, between justice and law: “Law (droit) is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule.”⁶⁷ Laws, Derrida observes, “suppose the generality of a rule, a norm or a universal imperative,” and therefore cannot directly engage with the radical particularity of justice, which “must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation.”⁶⁸ Echoing Sidney’s advocacy for a poesy unconstrained by all manner of law and rule, Derrida locates the project of deconstruction as reckoning with the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of “calculat[ing] with the incalculable.” Beyond naming a moment of knotted discourse, however, for Derrida aporia becomes a call to action—and, in a sense, the root of all ethical action. Its “undecidable” nature extends to the “experience of that which, though heterogenous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged … to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules.”⁶⁹ The crucial contention here is that any “decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process.”⁷⁰

Sidney anticipates Derrida’s account of ethical practice by distinguishing between the lawyer’s enforcement of obedience and the poet’s appeal to ideal virtues. The lawyer, he notes, “doth not endeavor to make men good, but that their evil hurt not others”; the poet, by contrast, seeks to “plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” (221). By compelling readers to “learn aright,” through the mysterious force of an imaginative idea’s persuasiveness, the poet promotes a “purifying of wit” that may “lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of” (219). Poetic knowledge is not one of the “serving sciences” that “have each a private end in themselves,” Sidney insists; it stands “in the knowledge of man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not well-knowing only” (219). The work of justice, Derrida implies, entails the work of poetic invention: “If I were content to apply a just rule, without a spirit of justice and without in some way inventing the rule and the example for each case, I might be protected by law (droit), my action corresponding to objective law, but I would not be just.”⁷¹ Sidney might add that he would not be a poet, either.

Confronting an aporia is easier said than done, and for poets such confrontations might most immediately resemble, as described above, experiences of writer’s block. Deborah P. Britzman identifies writer’s block as a “constellation of libidinal conflicts that bring to the fore matters of loyalty, affiliation, ideality, separation, and finding one’s own way.”⁷² The writing process threatens to disperse the writer’s sense of competence amid a sea of competing conflicts, making an aporia out of what first seemed like a self-willed opportunity. This discomfort, however, may itself become the platform from which the writer issues a new complaint: “Whether anxiety opts for the paragraph, sentence, or word, a story is being unwritten, and the writer can become interested in his or her aesthetic conflicts and, in writing, transform phantasy into a commentary on problems in the wider world.”⁷³ Most commentaries on modern writer’s block conclude in this way, recognizing, as Zachary Leader does, that “blockage and breakthrough often go together.”⁷⁴ Such a conclusion, however, leaves the hard work up to the struggling writer without any real guidance on how to proceed. One might become “interested” in one’s “aesthetic conflicts,” but where to go from there?

Sonnet 34, which ends with Astrophil writing while he doubts to write, appears to be a representation of such conflicts, but as the sequence develops, his relationship to aporia fluctuates. Nicholas Rescher suggests that aporias are exigencies that “constitute situations of forced choice among the alternative contentions” (emphasis in the original), and these choices may be understood as “a venture in cognitive damage control.”⁷⁵ The resigned “perhaps” of Sonnet 34 reflects one strategy, but as Sonnet 50 demonstrates, this is not the only method of “cognitive damage control” Astrophil deploys:

Stella, the fullness of my thoughts of thee

Cannot be stayed within my panting breast,

But they do swell and struggle forth of me,

Till that in words thy figure be expressed.

 And yet, as soon as they so formed be,

According to my lord love’s own behest,

With sad eyes I their weak proportion see,

To portrait that which in this world is best;

 So that I cannot choose but write my mind,

And cannot choose but put out what I write,

While those poor babes their death in birth do find:

And now my pen these lines had dashed quite,

But that they stopped his fury from the same,

Because their forefront bare sweet Stella’s name.

(A&S, 172, 1–14)

Astrophil’s thoughts of love “swell and struggle forth” to find expression and emerge as failures burdened with “weak proportion.” A central category of Elizabethan aesthetic appraisal, “proportion” was prized by writers adapting classical training to vernacular poetics for both its relationship to social decorum and its technical delimitations of quantity and measure.⁷⁶ Sidney himself says that things “disproportioned to ourselves in nature” (245) provoke corrective laughter, and also distinguishes poetry from “words as they chanceably fall from the mouth” because true poetry involves “peising each syllable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject” (219). The weakness of Astrophil’s lines thus marks his effort as laughable; in striving to “express” Stella’s figure, he instead issues something radically unworthy both of her and of his own investments. Dramatizing a discordance between his desire to write and his execution—“I cannot choose but write my mind,” he laments, before acknowledging that he “cannot choose but put out what I write”—he reanimates the tension with which the sonnet sequence opened. Whereas Sonnet 1 found Astrophil helpless in a pregnant pause until the intervention of his muse, however, Sonnet 34 ultimately threatens “death in birth,” a dashing out of words via the expenditure of the same ink that constituted them. At the “now” of the twelfth line, Astrophil’s quill abruptly hesitates—not to write, but to obliterate what he has written.

Sonnet 50 threatens the same self-silencing and confusion that threatened Sonnet 34, portraying an internal dispute worn lightly as a series of cascading conjunctions: five of its lines begin with “but,” “and,” or “so.” Over the course of the sequence leading up to this point, Astrophil’s internal conflicts, and his willingness to resolve them in pursuit of his own desire, had already begun to manifest. Sonnet 47 charts the transformation of similar self-addressed questions—“What, have I thus betrayed my liberty?” (A&S, 171, 47.1)—into a performance of self-admonishment in real time. “Virtue awake,” Astrophil rouses himself, “I may, I must, I can, I will, I do / Leave following that, which it is gain to miss.” He resolves to relinquish Stella, but immediately draws back his declaration: “Let her go. Soft, but here she comes” (A&S, 171, 47.9–12). At the end of Sonnet 50, however, such hesitations evaporate. Regarding his ability to write the poem’s forefront word—Stella—as legitimizing the poem itself, Astrophil sees the almost stillborn “babes” rouse to defend themselves. Sonnet 19’s assertion that his “very ink turns straight to Stella’s name” here becomes literal, but in this case Astrophil does not see his labors as “vainly spent” (A&S, 160, 19.6–8). We might say that by founding its legitimacy in its “forefront” word, Sonnet 50 champions the virtues of impulse. Astrophil is not blocked—“stopped”—because he does not have ideas or doubts his skill; he tarries because his ideas do not look as he at first believed they ought to look, traced over as he had been by the stylistic imperatives of propriety and proportion. Taking a cue from Victoria Nelson’s self-help guide to writer’s block, we might understand the word “Stella” that Astrophil finds himself thoughtlessly inscribing in Sonnet 50 as an inner child escaping the repressions of “step-dame study.” As Nelson puts it, “The bravest act a writer can perform is to take that tiny step forward, put down the wretched little word that pricks the balloon of inflated fantasies with its very mundanity, and then put down another word directly after it. This act marks the decision to be a writer.”⁷⁷ Stella’s name, and the poem it initiates, might be read as a breakthrough.

Whereas in the opening sonnet, Astrophil struggles to figure out how to show his love in verse before being told by his muse to look in his heart, in Sonnet 50 he finds himself nearly dismissing what his heart is telling him. His final decision is to let his heart’s cry echo out. By Sonnet 74, he has not only embraced what his heart has to say, but now believes himself truly inspired:

I never drank of Aganippe well,

Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit;

And muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell;

Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit.

Some do I hear of poet’s fury tell,

But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it;

And this I swear, by blackest brook of hell,

I am no pick-purse of another’s wit.

  How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease

My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow

In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?

Guess we the cause: “What, is it thus?” Fie, no;

  “Or so?” Much less: “How then?” Sure, thus it is:

  My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella’s kiss.

(A&S, 184, 74.1–14)

On the other side of doubt, Astrophil no longer concerns himself with the springs of Parnassus, divine inspiration, or the use of others’ words. He reflects on how easy his writing process has been—“My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow.” As these verses surge, moreover, Astrophil finds them warmly received by the so-called “best wits.” Rather than staging his own confusion and uncertainty—and never coming near any encounters with aporia—he finds them reflected in the responses of others: “How then?”

The reason for Astrophil’s poetic virtuosity, he explains, is Stella’s kiss—a kiss that Astrophil stole from Stella as she slept. It is explicitly narrated in the Second Song of the sequence as a violation: “Yet those lips so sweetly swelling / Do invite a stealing kiss: / Now will I but venture this; / Who will read, must first learn spelling” (A&S, 182–83, Song 2.21–24). Sonnet 74, which is the second sonnet after the inclusion of this song, reveals the kiss as a solution to Astrophil’s poetic problem. The fact that the opening eight lines of the sonnet borrow a heap of tropes renders this story of triumph ironic, however. The first four lines imitate, as confessed by a pun on “pick-purse” in line 8, the prologue to Persius’s Satires.⁷⁸ Moreover, that Stella’s kiss is a Platonic ideal situated at the crest of knowledge is itself a conventional device. Imitators of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, for example, pointed to the “epiphanic moment” usually provoked by an encounter with a beautiful woman as a salute, a greeting operating as salvation from a divine beloved. Such greetings often provoked a breakdown in communicative faculties. Astrophil, however, does not succumb to inexpressibility.⁷⁹ Having literally “stolen” his epiphany through sexual assault, he proceeds to “pick-purse” the images he uses write about it.

While Astrophil no longer hesitates, then, perhaps we should. Even he seems to acknowledge that the kiss he stole from Stella was an unequivocal violation. He has seen his love functioning like a poison eating away at his moral and civic duties, but even so, he justifies his theft as warranted. Yet the Second Song reports that when Stella woke up from the kiss, he fled because her “[l]ouring beauty chastens me” (A&S, 182–83, Song 2.26). In the subsequent poem, he reflects on his tawdry conquest as a dalliance attributable to Cupid, a boy “[s]chooled only by his mother’s tender eye” (A&S, 183–84, 73.2). This overly permissive homeschooling supposedly excuses his behavior by affiliating it with the force of love—but this tinges the sweetness his lips proclaim to possess with some bitter gall. Sonnet 79 echoes the first line of Sonnet 1, with the poet again wishing to set his thoughts in verse—“Sweet kiss, thy sweets I fain would sweetly endite”—but the metaphorical associations Astrophil conjures for the kiss are revealing: it is branded “schoolmaster of delight” for “[t]eaching the mean at once to take and give” (A&S, 186, 79.1, 8–9). These images perversely emphasize mutuality and cooperation, despite the reader’s knowledge that the kiss was taken rather than granted. Sonnet 80 refers to Stella’s lips as “[t]he new Parnassus, where the muses bide” and as “wisdom’s beautifier” (A&S, 186, 80.5–6), but the poet’s goals are no longer to express his desires or even win love, but to earn further sensual rewards. These worldly goals are emphasized by a poet earlier incapable of self-restraint now more than willing to “stay” his mouth in “spite of [his] heart” (A&S, 186, 80.10) if it means further kisses. It takes until Sonnet 82 for Astrophil to even hint at regret when he explains that he was “full of desire, empty of wit” and requests that Stella “[p]ardon that fault” by promising that he “never more will bite” (A&S, 187, 82.9, 14). Her kiss made Astrophil capable of writing without obstruction, but it also reduced him to a braggart proud of his sexual impropriety.

Humanist rhetoric armed its students with a host of tools with which to set about writing, but Tudor England’s ideological resistance to novelty blunted the efficacy of these instruments.⁸⁰ An overemphasis on liberation from disciplinary measures, however, might have proven just as dangerous—and just as conducive to bad art. Francis Bacon would point to poetry as “extremely licensed” discourse rooted in “the Imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.”⁸¹ These characterizations reverberate claims in Defence about poetry’s freedom to recombine and reconfigure nature into “Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like” (216). Astrophil’s conduct, however, makes Bacon’s imputation of poetry’s “unlawful” qualities ring out more ominously. Sidney contends that the “right” poet’s inventions would reconcile the proponent of what should be with the irresponsible dreamer of what may be. A testament to deliberating about the risky, reckless, violent thing, the first two-thirds of Astrophil and Stella have no advice about how to resolve writer’s block while still holding oneself up to the external standards of validation. By Sonnet 74, however, Astrophil has veered, biased by desire, and has broken the leash meant to rein in his impulses. The “unofficial voice” whom Bates reads as sabotaging Sidney’s Defence has become Astrophil’s silenced conscience. Though it cautions Astrophil against his own desires early in the sequence, it is ignored by the end of Sonnet 50 and utterly muted in Sonnet 74 as Astrophil’s explosive libido takes the reins in the scene of writing.

In his youth, Sidney felt that playing by the rules limited his ability to think, to communicate, and to share his dissatisfactions. His earliest work provides a sort of thesis for his poetic ambitions, a thesis that he would ambivalently reflect on throughout Defence and Astrophil and Stella. A collection of that early work, Certain Sonnets, was first published in 1598 but was largely composed shortly after Sidney’s travels in Europe in the 1570s. Reading it in retrospect reveals ideas he would more fully develop later. For example, Neil Rudenstine suggests that the collection “probably represents Sidney’s first half-random thoughts on the possibility of attempting a lyric sequence” because he “group[ed] the poems according to form and theme in an effort to suggest the growth and final decay of a courtly love affair.”⁸² The bulk of Certain Sonnets busies itself with exercises in formal imitation: many are written expressly to the “tune” of extant pieces of music such as “the Spanish song, Se tu señora no dueles de mi” (CS, 17–18, 7) or “a Neapolitan song, which beginneth: No, no, no, no” (CS, 32–33, 26). Two of the poems are translations, CS 12 out of Horace and CS 28 out of “the Diana of Montemayor in Spanish.”

Perhaps most remarkable of all are the poems in which Sidney experiments with quantitative metrical signatures. For these, he even provided scansion marks so that readers would have the prosodic equipment to recognize his efforts—perhaps no one would be able to “see” their proportion otherwise. If Astrophil worries about “weak proportion” in Sonnet 50, people like Sidney, Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, George Puttenham, Thomas Campion, and Samuel Daniel were worried about what “proportion” even signified when it came to vernacular English verse.⁸³ Sidney abandoned quantitative efforts in his later poetry, but in these experiments he self-consciously wrestled with the requirements of form. Elsewhere in Certain Sonnets, however, he wrestles not with the apparel his fancies might wear, but with the matter a poet might see fit to apparel in meter.

Certain Sonnets 16a–b are two poems, the first by Dyer and the second a response by Sidney, presenting competing fables. Dyer’s poem tells the story of a satyr who sees the fire that Prometheus brought down to earth from the heavens. Driven by desire, the satyr gives the fire a kiss. Burning his lips, the satyr then runs into the woods “with shouts and shrieking still.” The poem’s speaker then analogizes himself with the satyr, because upon beholding “an angel from above,” he now finds that he must “run and rest as pleaseth love” (CS, 23, 16a.6–12). Whereas the satyr burned his lips through his foolishness and fond desire, however, the speaker carries his pain in his heart, and pines from afar. The Second Song of Astrophil and Stella might be read as Sidney’s burlesque of this poem. In it, Astrophil comes across his “heavenly jewel” while she is asleep and resolves, unnervingly, to “invade the fort” (A&S, 182–83, Song 2.15). Like Dyer’s satyr, Astrophil kisses the perceived miracle, but he places responsibility for his actions on “those lips so sweetly swelling” (A&S, 182–83, Song 2.21). Whereas in Dyer’s poem the satyr is the one who engages in the kiss while the poet’s speaker merely gazes and admires his beloved from a distance, however, Sidney’s poem has the lover directly participate in blasphemy.

We can trace this impudence back to Sidney’s initial response to Dyer, Certain Sonnets 16b. In it, Sidney reframes the motives of the impulsive satyr:

A satyr once did run away for dread

With sound of horn, which he himself did blow;

Fearing and feared, thus from himself he fled,

 Deeming strange evil in that he did not know.

Such causeless fears when coward minds do take

 It makes them fly that which they fain would have:

As this poor beast, who did his rest forsake,

 Thinking not why, but how, himself to save.

Even thus might I, for doubts which I conceive

 Of mine own words, my own good hap betray,

And thus might I for fear of maybe, leave

 The sweet pursuit of my desired prey.

  Better I like thy satyr, dearest Dyer,

  Who burnt his lips to kiss faire shining fire.

(CS, 24, 16b.1–14)

Sidney’s fable is about a timorous satyr who scares himself with his own horn. In the poem’s final stanza, Sidney associates himself with the satyr in a mysterious allusion to the “doubts” that he “conceive[s].” These doubts understand that what “may be” is not necessarily what “should be”; we might associate them with the unwelcome love that Astrophil and Sidney nurture in their hearts for unavailable women, with an unquenchable desire that is at best indiscreet and at worst toxic. The young Sidney, in this friendly poetic contest, recognizes himself as too timid to keep up the pursuit, but he nevertheless sides with impudent transgression. As he matured, he would grow into a reputable—if tetchy and disagreeable—statesman, and as a reformed prodigal he would show that he could play it safe. This early poem, however, glints with fiery irresponsibility. “Better I like thy satyr,” Sidney writes; better to transgress in the belief that you might have been struck by inspiration than to be a coward. He saw that one way around or through writer’s block was with a truant pen, but it is important to emphasize that in the fullness of Astrophil and Stella, he would not suggest that reckless expression become the final seat of poesy.⁸⁴ While Astrophil blows past his dilemma in Sonnet 74, in ceasing to doubt himself he becomes like one of those amorous poets Sidney criticizes in Defence, who coldly apply fiery speeches borrowed from others’ pages.

Throughout the sequence, Astrophil presents the tensions inherent to public utterance in the form of silence hesitantly taking the shape of sound: “But when their tongues could not speak,” Sidney writes in the Eighth Song, “Love itself did silence break; / Love did set his lips asunder, / Thus to speak in love and wonder” (A&S, 195–98, Song 8.25–28). At times, Astrophil finds his writing to be divinely inspired, flawless, and met with wide applause; other times, he is forced to wonder why it is met with indifference and not having the effects he had anticipated. This culminates with the poet disappointed during a clandestine meeting, at which Stella confesses her love for Astrophil but ultimately refuses him. There are simply too many competing and conflicting pressures, she reasons, that obstruct them. Finding his love unrequited, his reputation withering, and his poems impotent, he concludes the sequence resigned to frustrated hopes:

When sorrow, using mine own fire’s might

Melts down his lead into my boiling breast,

Through that dark furnace to my heart oppressed

There shines a joy from thee, my only light:

But soon as thought of thee breeds my delight,

And my young soul flutters to thee, his nest;

Most rude despair, my daily unbidden guest,

Clips straight my wings, straight wraps me in his night,

And makes me then bow down my head, and say:

“Ah, what doth Phoebus’ gold that wretch avail

Whom iron doors do keep from use of day?”

So strangely, alas, thy works in me prevail,

That in my woes for thee thou art my joy,

And in my joys for thee my only annoy.

(A&S, 211, 108.1–14)

Astrophil’s final bind encapsulates the entire sequence’s relationship to writing. Oscillating between affective poles—sorrow and joy, delight and despair—the poem reveals its poet as remaining torn between a need to write and the impossibility or impotence of writing. This conflict manifests in the competing forces of Astrophil’s “young soul” about to take flight and the pinioning it experiences—a “halting” creature violently stayed. The raw material of poetic inspiration, “Phoebus’ gold,” proves too pliant when battered against “iron doors” impeding its reception, and so the poet is left feeling strange, perplexed, uncomfortable. Though Astrophil is finished setting pen to paper, rather than about to begin, Astrophil and Stella ends just as it began, with a fluttering fire in the poet’s fingertips. A perpetual contest between disciplined decisiveness and restive desire, poesy shudders on both sides of writing.

Reflection: Released into Language

By what means do literary critics invent their claims? In “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” (1991), Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor surveyed a collection of articles published between 1978 and 1982 in journals of “established reputation” and categorized the forms of argumentation they witnessed therein against the classical stases (existence, definition, evaluation, cause, proposal).⁸⁵ They observed that while literary scholars rarely adhered to the expected causal linkages predicated by these stasis issues, the scholars nevertheless tended to rely on several “special topoi,” which Fahnestock and Secor describe as “warrants that Aristotle and later rhetoricians identified, to supplement the common topoi, as most useful in particular persuasive situations.”⁸⁶ The most prevalent special topic provoked by the “particular persuasive situation” of academic literary studies at the end of the 1970s was “appearance/reality,” or the idea that there is “something underneath” the superficial surface of a text. Other common topoi were “ubiquity” (the critic finding “many examples of the same thing” or “one thing in many forms”); “paradox” (the critic locates “the prized unification of apparently irreconcilable opposites in a single startling dualism”); “contemptus mundi” (the critic finds through the reading “an assumption of despair over the condition and course of modern society”); and “paradigm” (the critic locates a “recognizable set of relationships drawn from the world outside the literary text, and then detects its avatars in a particular genre or work,” thereby allowing the critic to “bring many apparently diverse works under a single definition”).⁸⁷ Even if literary critics are not explicitly taught to emulate these topoi, enough experience with reading and citing others’ arguments encourages aspiring writers toward them.

Laura Wilder’s Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies (2012) revisits Fahnestock and Secor’s analysis, surveying articles published between 1999 and 2001 to observe that many of the special topics Fahnestock and Secor identified still hold. I would wager that, a decade after Wilder’s study, they still would. This chapter comprises a constellation of them—but primarily makes a case for the ubiquity of hesitation in Sidney’s conception of poesy.⁸⁸ Seeing these patterns of argumentation as “the almost imperceptible and generally taken-for-granted fibers that hold together this disparate and diverse discourse community,” Wilder then surveyed teachers about their responses to student writing, finding that their “understandings of persuasiveness, originality, and complexity appear to have been so thoroughly shaped by their disciplinary training that student essays are found more persuasive, original, and complex the more they follow the conventions of the professional genre of the literary-analysis journal article.”⁸⁹ This makes sense: the way professors are taught to invent becomes the way they eventually evaluate their students’ inventions.

In response to these findings, Wilder proposes making these special topoi explicit to undergraduate students. Wilder, along with Joanna Wolfe, designed a set of experimental classes in which the “special topoi” would be introduced to students as structuring elements in the way writing and reading would be discussed:⁹⁰

Instructors wove explicit references to the special topoi into peer-review guidelines and grading criteria. They asked students to read examples of student writing and published criticism and analyze them for their use of the topoi. They assigned critical theory and modeled for students how to use this theory in service of the paradigm topos. They referred explicitly to the topoi in their written comments on student work and in student conferences. Perhaps most important of all, they demonstrated how to use the special topoi as tools for invention in class brainstorming sessions and in nearly all discussions of literary texts.⁹¹

When papers by students presented with this experimental pedagogy were evaluated alongside papers by students from classes in which the special topoi were mentioned only tacitly (or left unmentioned), their writing was found to be more persuasive, more complex, and more “original.”⁹² At the same time, Wilder and Wolfe found that the method had its drawbacks. Some students, they observed, imposed the special topics on the texts, applying conventions rather than attending to the texts themselves. “One student” writing about a novel, Wilder notes, “made glaringly inappropriate use of these conventions” by “explicitly naming the topoi and claiming that they exist in the novel (rather than using them to analyze the novel),” consequently producing “phrasings that would never appear in the kind of professional discourse that was the target for this course.”⁹³ To recall a key term from chapter 1, what this student produced was a bit of bodgery. Students who see any topics of invention as prescriptions, rather than resources—students who practice invention as a formal process without any kairotic engagement with the text and its immediate details—may fall into this trap. Wilder and Wolfe also received some pushback from the colleagues who taught these experimental classes, regarding giving the students such explicit instructions; some teachers, they found, felt that introducing these strategies stifled creativity and encouraged students to professionalize too quickly.⁹⁴

The special topoi, like the five-paragraph essay, can be useful only when students treat them as an invitation to stage a debate between their thoughts and the structures of argumentation expected by their readers. While these conventions and templates risk becoming prescriptive, that does not make them useless. As teachers who expect certain formal standards to be met, we must demonstrate what it means to claim these standards as instruments for thought, as paths that students might choose to walk while nevertheless armed with tactical agency.

Throughout her career as a writer and teacher, Wendy Bishop recommended moving away from prescriptive writing pedagogy, proposing instead that adopting a workshop model, as in creative writing classes, would allow students to learn “what it feels like to be a writer, someone who generates, drafts, revises, shares, and publishes writing, someone who experiences blocks, anxiety, elation, and success.”⁹⁵ In Released into Language (1990), Bishop offers strategies for leading students to the feeling of making or struggling to make a discovery, of recognizing the difficult and potentially dangerous passage between free private play and regulated public life. Even as she noted and embraced challenges to “current-traditional rhetoric” by expressivist compositionists advancing “subjective theories of instruction that were not dissimilar to those promulgated in graduate creative writing workshops,” however, Bishop sympathized with constructivists who labeled these challenges guilty of romanticized views of authorship. In response, Bishop proposed an approach centered on neither texts nor authors but on the transactions between them. Its goal was to expose “the way in which individual writers borrow, adapt, steal from, acknowledge, and are consciously or unconsciously influenced by other texts they have encountered.”⁹⁶ As part of this pedagogy, she appropriated invention exercises from rhetorical compositionists—activities such as having students use clichés intentionally, or deploy a variety of different metaphors about a character, or reverse perceived truths or stereotypes—because, as Bishop explains, invention lies “on a continuum from writer’s apprentice work and, often experimental, self-assignments to more conventional, commissioned work.”⁹⁷

Protocols of invention, models, and exercises, in this light, are meant to give novice writers “insights into professional writers’ self-challenges.”⁹⁸ These exercises, Bishop explains, can be used “to help writers get started, to help writers continue writing and avoid writing blocks, and to help explore writers’ activities and rituals.”⁹⁹ Like Wilder, Bishop feels that professors should endeavor to lay bare as much as they can what the discursive habits of the discipline are, but she also feels that they should recognize that every example threatens to become a rule, and that rules can stifle reflection. Models, templates, and heuristics will always have a role to play in writing instruction, but the degree of authority with which they are invested need not be static or unquestioned.

In “Places to Stand,” Bishop laments how “we tend to do to our students what is done to us” because “if we feel pushed toward writing a certain type of professional text, we will probably expect the same of our students.”¹⁰⁰ This corroborates points made by Lindsay Parker and James Gifford, who find within the operations of a university a host of lumbering contradictions between thinking, doing, and making. The university, they note, will often “extol rational thought and the necessity for self-determination in decision-making” but also simultaneously “establish relations and institutional conformity of a constraining, directive sort that seek to subordinate the exercise of reason to structure, form, and tradition.” Such an institutional setup creates and promotes a “risk-averse environment” that renders “competition petty and ambitions pedestrian.”¹⁰¹ In order to teach critical inquiry as a process of deliberation whereby budding writers develop confidence in their ability to ask new questions, literature professors might create spaces in which students can actually experience what it feels like to inquire, to think out loud and on the page, without a fear of stepping beyond the velvet ropes of structure, form, and tradition. One way to do this, Parker and Gifford suggest, is “low-stakes learning,” which “permits high-risk intellectual engagement via low competition and by temporarily suspending the false adversarial binary of winners and losers in risk taking and evaluation.”¹⁰² Can we reimagine the literature classroom so that it does not evaluate products and, instead, focuses on process—where students may be corrected and challenged without feeling as if they have failed? The next chapter explores this question in greater detail. Yet even if we choose to assess process over product and set evaluation aside, the fact remains that we still need to teach some sort of process, and that this process will involve the production of wrong answers, incoherence, and bad writing.

I have adopted a classroom practice that terrified me when I initiated it years ago, after I first encountered Bishop’s writings.¹⁰³ When I assign students a critical essay, in the subsequent class I connect my laptop to a classroom projector, open a blank document, and begin undertaking the assignment myself. I treat it as an improvisational game: I solicit specific topics and moments that students remember from the reading (Astrophil’s horse! Cavendish’s outfits! The monkey in Utopia! Donne’s obsession with eyeballs!), or we simply flip to a random page and work from there. After we collectively decide on a topic by discussing what might be interesting about each option, I challenge the class to hunt down and help me transcribe a passage related to it. I then do my best to make sure that we read the passage very slowly by imposing strict guidelines on how we are to pay attention to it. We are not allowed, I insist, to talk about things not present in the passage itself. To start, we document what we see—everything from punctuation marks to metaphors to less-than-common words. Then we elaborate on specific features within the passage that strike us as significant for any reason at all—how the metaphor evokes other parts of the text, how the punctuation creates a kind of rhythm, and so on. Third, we try to connect whatever we found significant in the passage to our prior sense of why the topic or question we decided on was worth pursuing. As we talk things over, I messily transcribe students’ comments on the document. (This part took a little practice, but it also forced me to keep my own mouth shut.) After we amass a wealth of observations, I pick over them, forming clusters of ideas that relate to one another, explaining what I perceive the relationships to be. I then start typing a paragraph, introducing the quotation with a few sentences before pasting it in. After the block quote, I pull from the discussion notes to craft sentences of analysis. I make it a point to emphasize that most of what we talked about is not making its way into my analysis—that our notes were important to our thinking but would only be distracting for the reader.

We generally do not get very deep into composing the essay after an hour of class. Usually we end up with (what I would call) a drafty paragraph offering an attempt at close reading. Really, the only difference between this lesson plan and a standard practice of engaging in classroom close reading is the open document and the imperative to turn the conversation into writing, but the open document and its white space are crucial to disambiguating process. I force myself, in doing this, to explain both the mundane and the vital aspects of composing criticism. The multiple points of radical incoherence involved in this approach are liberating, even thrilling. We start with nothing and slowly build, unsure of what we are building. Rather than offering students a template, this exercise puts the template to work as a tool we can choose to use—and a tool that cannot do the thinking for us. Sometimes our collective analysis of the passage is somewhat flimsy. Even in these instances, the process lets students see how they might get started on their own essays by clarifying how the process will and should be challenging. By steering into the skids of critical invention imagined neither as a flash of inspiration nor as an airing out of familiar arguments, it imagines criticism as akin to poetry in a commitment to collaboratively reimagining what may be.

1.All references to Sidney’s work, unless otherwise noted, will be to Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, and indicated in-text by page number and, in the case of sonnets, sonnet number and line numbers. Astrophil and Stella is abbreviated A&S, and Certain Sonnets is abbreviated CS.

2.As William Ringler puts it in his notes on the poem, by beginning with elocutio rather than inventio, Astrophil undertakes his composition “in the wrong order with an inadequate method.” Ringler, Poems, 458–59.

3.For more context on this line, situating it among humanist debates over Ciceronianism, see Armstrong, Ciceronian Sunburn, 8–9.

4.Plett, “Rhetoric and Humanism,” 379–80.

5.Jonson, “Discoveries,” Complete Poems, 425–26.

6.Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, A3r–v.

7.Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 18–19.

8.Ringler, Poems, lii.

9.Mann, “Aporia.”

10.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Invention, n., Def. 3a.,” accessed July 12, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/98969.

11.Greene, Five Words, 20. Hannah Crawforth similarly observes that in the sixteenth century, it became an “etymological crux” that captured twinned commitments to both the recovery of already extant arguments and the creation of novel ideas. Crawforth, Etymology, 2–3. Also see Sumillera, “Poetic Invention and Translation.”

12.For more on Gosson and Sidney, see Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 221.

13.For Sidney’s biography, I have relied on Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney; Osborn, Young Philip Sidney; Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development; and Berry, Making of Sir Philip Sidney.

14.Spenser also commented, to confirm his own apprehensions about patronage and publication, “Such follie is it not to regarde aforehande the inclination and qualitie of him to whome we dedicate oure Bookes.” Spenser’s letter to Harvey can be found in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:87–92; quote on 89.

15.See below for more discussion of Levao, “Sidney’s Feigned Apology.” Also see Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, 128.

16.Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, 141.

17.Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, 9–10.

18.On the meaning and etymology of “stasis,” see Dieter, “Stasis.” As Peter Mack notes, none of the textbooks used in Tudor grammar schools addressed stasis at length, despite it being a major concern of classical rhetoricians. See Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 40.

19.See Nadeau, “Classical Systems,” 53. As Laura Wilder summarizes, modern rhetoricians have added one question to this system and affiliated the questions with five stasis “issues”: existence (Did it happen?), definition (What is it?), evaluation (Is it good?), cause (What caused it?), and proposal (What should be done about it?). Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 17.

20.For Thomas Wilson’s account of stasis, or “state,” see Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 48v.

21.Corbett, Classical Rhetoric, 95.

22.As Corbett puts it, “The Latin loci communes … were set pieces, stored away for future incorporation into a speech when the need for such arguments presented itself.” Corbett, “The Topoi Revisited,” 48.

23.Lauer, Invention, 23. As Wilder observes (citing Carolyn Miller), for Aristotle it was the special topics (idioi topoi), as opposed to the common topics (koinoi topoi), that enabled rhetoric to serve as a “compromise between the promise of rhetoric as a broadly applicable and teachable subject, for which complexity must be reducible to useful precepts, and rhetoric as a field of research, where careful observation of discourse practices reveals the messiness of specificity and diversity.” See Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 17–18; and Miller, “Aristotle’s ‘Special Topics.’ ”

24.This position, like many in the treatise, derives from Horace: “I do not see of what avail is either study, when not enriched by Nature’s vein, or native wit, if untrained.” Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, 485 (lines 409–10).

25.“By theory is meant a set of rules that provide a definite method and system of speaking. Imitation stimulates us to attain, in accordance with a studied method, the effectiveness of certain models in speaking. Practice is assiduous exercise and experience in speaking.” [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, 6–9 (1.ii.3).

26.Sidney’s poets come to resemble exemplary rhetoricians such as those envisioned by Crassus at the start of Cicero’s De oratore, who possess “a knowledge of very many matters” because without this, “oratory is but an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage.” Cicero, On the Orator, 13–15 (1.v.17).

27.Sidney appears to derive this from Scaliger; see Scaliger, Select Translations, 2.

28.Gosson, for example, characterizes the poets as akin to the “wanton whelpe” that “leaveth the game to runne riot.” Gosson, School of Abuse, 9.

29.According to Brady Wagoner, Sidney anticipates accounts of creativity in social psychology as “present in both the internalization or subjectification phase, where different objects and meanings freely coalesce and combine, as well as the externalization and objectification phase, where subjective imagery must be given order and structure to be communicated to others.” See Wagoner, “Creativity as Symbolic Transformation,” 26. Also see Runco, “ ‘Big C, Little c’ Creativity.”

30.LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act.

31.LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act, 7.

32.Sloane, On the Contrary, 38.

33.Sloane, On the Contrary, 40.

34.Carter, “Stasis and Kairos,” 103. See also Stephenson, Forecasting Opportunity, 6.

35.Sipiora, “Introduction,” 4.

36.Poulakos, “Logic of Greek Sophistry,” 17.

37.Poulakos, “Logic of Greek Sophistry,” 18.

38.Sipiora, “Introduction,” 1. For more on kairos, see Kinneavy, “Kairos.” The essays in Sipiora and James S. Baumlin’s edited volume, Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, also offer a broad and crucial introduction to the concept. Reconsiderations of the concept for Renaissance studies, and especially Shakespeare studies, have been emerging; see Paul, “Use of Kairos”; Beehler, “ ‘Confederate Season’ ”; Baker, “Hamlet and the Kairos”; Hunt, “Ripeness of Time”; and Witmore, Culture of Accidents, 79.

39.As Paul Tillich observes, kairos connects the timeless ideality of customs and laws, or logos, with the immediacy of present circumstances. Tillich, Interpretation of History, 129–51.

40.Sipiora, “Introduction,” 6. Debra Hawhee explains that “kairos emerges often in Greek literature and philosophy in the context of athletic and rhetorical encounters—in short, kairos is the time of the agoˉn, the immediacy that calls for quick, cunning response.” In its quick, deftly tuned responsiveness to live circumstance, kairos recalls its original affiliations with athletics and embodiment, pointing to the “opening” at which the skillful archer might place a well-timed and aimed shot—“the kair- root is used adjectivally (kairios) to indicate a critical, fatal spot on the body.” Hawhee, Bodily Arts, 12, 71.

41.Miller, foreword, xii–xiii.

42.Responding to Dale Sullivan’s account of a “kairos of inspiration” as a kind of nonrational “flow” state connected with “romantic concepts of genius or vitalism or with divine madness,” Hawhee sees “kairotic inspiration” as more materially grounded and embodied. It is akin, she says, to “the act of breathing in, or a commingling of momentary elements” wherein “the rhetor opens him or herself up to the immediate situation.” See Sullivan, “Rhetoric of Belief,” 319; Hawhee, Bodily Arts, 71. For Lisbeth Lipari, Hawhee’s account of kairos links it fundamentally to a posture of listening. Lipari, “Ethics, Kairos, and Akroasis,” 89.

43.“Having opened on a poem that focuses on failure,” as Heather Dubrow puts it, Sidney “proceeds later in the sequence to present his own verse as a source and symbol of both his power … and his powerlessness.” Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 107.

44.Edward Berry recounts how Languet inculcated in young Sidney the ideal values of the humanist program: “duty to parents, service to state, a thrifty use of time, a preference for moral philosophy and history over poetry, truth to one’s self.” Berry, Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 31.

45.This poem sees Astrophil “born to self-division, to alienation from himself,” writes Gavin Alexander. “[T]he comfort of self-expression … has slipped into the pleasure of reading,” raising the question of to whom the “end” of writing poetry is ultimately directed. Alexander, Writing after Sidney, 18.

46.Probyn, Blush, 149.

47.Probyn, Blush, 147.

48.Probyn, Blush, 162.

49.Probyn, Blush, 162.

50.Levao, “Sidney’s Feigned Apology,” 230. Citing claims like the “Platonic-Augustinian argument” that locates poets’ access to divine ideality within notions of inspired genius as being made by affected voices, Levao argues that Sidney’s actual position is that “inspiration is not the cause of the poet’s conceit but the effect that the conceit has on the reader.” Levao, “Sidney’s Feigned Apology,” 224.

51.Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, 9–10.

52.Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, 141.

53.Rose, Writer’s Block, 19.

54.Zachary Leader suggests that these contradictions far exceed the cognitive discipline encouraged by teachers: “[B]locked writers fail to negotiate rival or opposing claims, variously associated with pairings such as inner and outer, primary and secondary processes, emergence and embeddedness, independence and incorporation, inspiration and elaboration, defusion and merger, subject and object, written and oral, ‘male’ and ‘female.’ ” Leader, Writer’s Block, 251.

55.Singer and Barrios, “Writer’s Block,” 225, 229. Also see Birk, “Sounds of Silence,” 14; and, for an account closer to home for academic writers, Crosby, “Writer’s Block.”

56.Berry, Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 24–25. Also see Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 273.

57.Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare, 20.

58.Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 7 (1.1.10). Such an oversight led Yameng Liu to point out that stasis was in itself not all that important to Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric because “deliberative speech does not necessarily contain ‘a conflict of opinion.’ ” Liu, “Aristotle,” 57.

59.[Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, 159 (III.ii,2).

60.Building on examples like this, Robert Shenk suggests that there was a “rough consensus upon a deliberative counterpart to traditional stasis” among classical rhetoricians, a consensus that coalesced around what Shenk calls a “forestasis.” The forestasis would essentially consist of three questions: “Is it possible?” “Is it expedient, or beneficial?” and “Is it honorable, or just?” Shenk, “Deliberative Stasis,” 195. For Aristotle and other ancient rhetoricians, however, any generalized systematization for deliberation would threaten to restrict the truly expansive reach of deliberative rhetoric, because in Aristotle’s framing, the rhetoric’s purpose “is not so much to persuade, as to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion.” Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 13 (1.1.14).

61.Yarbrough, “Deliberate Invention,” 92.

62.Derrida, Aporias, 12.

63.Aristotle, Metaphysics, 97 (III.2).

64.In Plato’s Meno, for example, Socrates drives Meno to “utter perplexity” when Meno perceives an aporia and feels his “soul and [his] tongue quite benumbed” and himself “at a loss.” Plato, Laches. Protagoras. Meno. Euthydemus, 297.

65.Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 311.

66.Mann, “Aporia.”

67.Derrida, “Force of Law,” 16.

68.Derrida, “Force of Law,” 17.

69.Derrida, “Force of Law,” 24.

70.Derrida, “Force of Law,” 24.

71.Derrida, “Force of Law,” 17.

72.Britzman, Psychoanalyst in the Classroom, 112.

73.Britzman, Psychoanalyst in the Classroom, 109.

74.Leader, Writer’s Block, 252.

75.Rescher, Aporetics, 4, 8.

76.For more on the aesthetics of proportion, see Wiseman, “Poetics of the Natural.”

77.Nelson, Writer’s Block, 15.

78.“Nec fonte labra prolui caballino, / nec in bicipti somniasse Parnaso / memini, ut repente sic poeta prodirem” (I never got my lips well drenched in the hack’s spring / Nor do I recollect having had a dream on the two-forked Parnassus / so as to burst upon the world at once a full-blown poet). Flaccus, Satires, 3–6.

79.See Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, 23.

80.On the resistance to novelty, see Brown, “New Poet.”

81.Bacon, Works of Francis Bacon, 202.

82.Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 117.

83.The authoritative account of these debates about meter is Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables.

84.On rebellious schoolboys, see Lamb, Reading Children, 131.

85.Fahnestock and Secor, “Rhetoric of Literary Criticism,” 77.

86.Fahnestock and Secor, “Rhetoric of Literary Criticism,” 84.

87.Fahnestock and Secor, “Rhetoric of Literary Criticism,” 87–89.

88.In addition to tracking this consistency, however, Wilder observes that in the more recent articles the topoi showed that they had “evolved with the discipline and prompted new topoi”—the “mistaken-critic topos, the context topos, and a topos that subverts contemptus mundi, the social justice topos.” Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 34.

89.Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 54, 97.

90.Details of their study can be found in Wilder and Wolfe, “Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge.”

91.Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 121.

92.Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 117.

93.Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 119.

94.Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 54. For Wilder’s response to these critiques, see 174–201.

95.Bishop, Released into Language, 2–3. Also see Bishop, “Crossing the Lines”; and Hawkins, “Irrational Element.” As Patrick Bizzaro suggests in a retrospective essay, Wendy Bishop’s most enduring contributions to the pedagogy of writing were her emphasis on the “interconnectedness of creative writing and composition studies” and her insistence that the teaching of writing be informed by ethnographic study of what experienced writers do when they go about their work. Bizzaro, “Writers Wanted,” 258.

96.Bishop, Released into Language, 14, 41.

97.Bishop, Released into Language, 69–70; the exercises mentioned appear at 85, 101, and 111.

98.Bishop, Released into Language, 71.

99.Bishop, Released into Language, 48–49.

100.Bishop, “Places to Stand,” 21.

101.Parker and Gifford, “Rethinking How Humanities Think,” 110.

102.Parker and Gifford, “Rethinking How Humanities Think,” 110.

103.This practice felicitously resembles one suggested by Wilder, involving “think-aloud” recordings of professors. Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies, 122.