Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)
Katona Gábor: Twentieth Century Critical Bias Concerning the Choice of a Dominating Philosophical Influence in idney's Defence
100 Plato, however, expelled the poets from his ideal republic, although Sidney believes that he expelled only the bad poets. A group of twentieth-century critics try to find the link between Platonic thinking and Sidney's argumentation. A. C. Hamilton 8 justifies Sidney's viewpointing out that Scaliger was the first to return to Plato's classification of poets based on the theory of divine inspiration. Sidney slightly alters Scaliger's doctrine as he considers philosophical and religious verse to be alien from poetry proper, because the poet belonging to the third group "doeth not imitate external nature, but rather its reality, which he perceives in his own mind." The "right poet" brings his "own stuff" and does not rely on impressions coming from the senses. • Krouse and Hamilton are the first who get to the core of Sidney's Platonism. Reinhard Böhler^, when analysing the freefold functioning of teaching, delighting and moving in poetry, tries to convince us that Sidney's definition of "mimesis" is a Platonic definition. Hamilton thinks that the aim of poetry for Sidney was not only moving or the evocation of catharsis, but that it also supplemented the power of divine grace: "What poetry presents is a revelation, a vision of the golden world. Since Sidney gives poetry a power beyond moving, which the sixteenth-century Italian critics allowed - it moves upward and so supplements the power of grace." * ^ Similarly, DeNeef maintains that for Sidney "the Fall can be reversed through poetry". 1 1 Comparing DeNeef's view to that of Hamilton, who holds that the teleology of Sidney's poetics is to move men to their salvation,Bergvall warns us that the Florentine bias of these quotations "is very rarely questioned, and appears to be accepted 1 ^ as received critical dogma. J A. E. Malloch investigates the functioning of yet another Aristotelian principle in the Defence : "Poetry is a serving science ... it has a private end in itself, and yet is directed toward that mistress knowledge called "architectonic", which consists in the knowledge of a man's own self, Iiis self-knowledge, however, is far from being a private and individual affair." * ^ Malloch connects the principle of "architectonic knowledge" with Sidney's interpretation of the "logos": "The logos (will a small ' 1') unifies the secular community as the Divine Logos unifies that Christian community. Hearer and speaker participate equally in the word and it was this fact which prompted the Romans to translate the Greek logos' as 'ratio et
