Philip Sidney probably wrote his landmark sonnet sequence,

, between 1581 and 1582 during a period at Wilton House, the estate of his sister’s husband, the Earl of Pembroke. At that time Sidney was most likely at work not only on the sonnets of

, but also on a prose treatise arguing in favour of poetry and imaginative literature in general. (This treatise later came to be known as either

or

, according to the titles of its two different printings in 1595.) It is impossible to establish which work Sidney completed first, but it is suggestive that the sonnets of

emerged at around the same time as their author was thinking about poetry in a more theoretical vein. Yet the relationship…

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Citation: Howe, Sarah. "Astrophil and Stella". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 July 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6494, accessed 24 November 2024.]