Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English
criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written
criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually
ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own
goal.
It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of
English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of
the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's _School of
Abuse_, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who
had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry
were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan
criticism, that of Lodge, [Footnote: _Defense of Poetry, Musick and
Stage Plays._] Harrington, [Footnote: _Apology for Poetry._] Meres,
[Footnote: _Palladis Tamia._] Campion, [Footnote: _Observations in the
Art of English Poetry._] Daniel, [Footnote: _Defense of Rhyme._] and
even in lesser degree of Sidney, obscures the aesthetic problem by
turning it into an ethical one.
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