Sonnet XXXI
by Sir Philip Sidney

English poet, courtier, patron of poets and scholars. One of the great literary figures of Elizabethan England, his heroic prose romance, the Arcadia (1580, revised 1584) was the most important work of prose fiction in sixteenth-century England. He wrote the first great Elizabethan sonnet cycles, Astrophil and Stella (1582), a sequence of one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs which explore the mind of the lover. His Defense of Poesie (1589) was the finest work of Elizabethan literary criticism. His successful experiments and technique influenced many other Renaissance poets like Spenser, Campion, Drayton and Jonson.