“Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge.”

Learning is more welcome when it is given in pleasing speech · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Knowledge
• Language
• Poetry

“Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature.”

The poet is a maker who can improve or remake what nature gives · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Creation
• Imagination
• Poetry

“There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object.”

Even the arts that invent still begin from nature · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Art
• Creation
• Nature

“Only for you, only to you... for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, triflingly handled.”

He presents a major work as a private gift rather than a public monument · Letter to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, on the Arcadia

• Family
• Modesty
• Writing

“Love my memory, cherish my friends; their faith to me may assure you they were honest. But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator.”

A dying charge of friendship, memory, and piety · Last words to his brother Robert, as recorded

• Death
• Faith
• Friendship

“Thy necessity is greater than mine.”

Wounded, he is said to have given water to a dying soldier · Conversation at Zutphen, as commonly attested

• Compassion
• Honour
• Sacrifice

“I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.”

Popular ballad can stir the spirit as martial music does · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Emotion
• Music
• Poetry

“He cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.”

Story can command attention across ages · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Poetry
• Readers
• Storytelling

“It is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, but that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching.”

Verse is ornament; invention and moral shaping define the poet · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Poetry
• Poets
• Virtue

“Poesy is an art of imitation... a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight.”

Poetry joins moral instruction with pleasure · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Delight
• Poetry
• Teaching

“Of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar.”

Historians and scientists affirm and so can err; the poet invents without asserting · Essay, The Defence of Poesy

• Poetry
• Truth
• Writers

“The poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”

Distinguishing imaginative invention from literal claims about fact · Essay, An Apology for Poetry

• Imagination
• Poetry
• Truth

“Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture.”

Defining poetry as an art that represents experience through imaginative likeness · Essay, An Apology for Poetry

• Art
• Imagery
• Poetry