Now if only high schools taught this kind of writing…
All this talk about rhetoric reminded me of my favorite mock-oration ever, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, and especially its conclusion:
I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the Nine Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of poetry, no more to laugh at the name of "poets," as though they were next inheritors to fools, nor more to jest at the reverent title of a "rimer"; but to believe, with Aristotle, that they were the ancient treasurers of the Grecians’ divinity; to believe, with Bembus, that they were first bringers-in of all civility; to believe, with Scaliger, that no philosopher’s precepts can sooner make you an honest man than the reading of Vergil; … lastly, to believe themselves, when they tell you they will make you immortal by their verses.
Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printers’ shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface; thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all; you shall dwell upon superlatives. … But if (fie of such a but) you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry, or rather, by a certain rustical disdain, will become such a mome as to be a Momus of poetry; then, though I will not wish unto you the ass’s ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a poet’s verses (as Bubonax was) to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet, and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.
(from Sir Philip Sidney: Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 2nd ed., 156-158)
You know, when I first read the Defence as an undergraduate, I found it dry. Now I wonder how I could have missed its pull-out-all-the-stops exuberance and the fascinating way it grapples with the ethics of a genre that Renaissance writers often considered false or "feigning." I think it was seeing that final paragraph excerpted as a literature GRE practice question that got me to return to Sidney; I didn’t recognize the passage, wondered who wrote it, and was surprised when I looked at the answer key. And seven years later, I have another passage from the Defence to thank for a big chunk of my dissertation.
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