An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy) is a work of literary criticism by Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney. It was written in approximately 1580 and first published in 1595, after his death. It is generally believed that he was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579, but Sidney primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as those of Plato. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage. Sidney states that there "have been three general kinds" of poetry: (i) "the chief" being religious which "imitate[d] the inconceivable excellencies of God", (ii) philosophical and (iii) imaginative poetry written by "right poets" who "teach and delight". Influence Philip Sidney's influence can be seen throughout the subsequent history of English literary criticism. One of the most important examples is in the work of the poet and critic Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley's modern argument for poetry is cast in a Romantic strain in his critical work "A Defence of Poetry". In 1858, William Stigant, a Cambridge-educated translator, poet and essayist, writes in his essay "Sir Philip Sidney" that Shelley's "beautifully written Defence of Poetry is a work which "analyses the very inner essence of poetry and the reason of its existence,—its development from, and operation on, the mind of man". Shelley writes in Defence that while "ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created", and leads to a moral civil life, poetry acts in a way that "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought". Sidney's influence on future critics and poets relates more closely to his view of the place of poets in society. Sidney describes poetry as creating a separate reality. The Romantic notion, as seen in Wordsworth, is that poetry privileges perception, imagination and modes of understanding. Wordsworth seeks to go back to nature for moments recollected in tranquility. Sidney, like Shelley and Wordsworth, sees the poet as being separate from society. To Sidney the