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Question

Where can I find literary criticism on line?

Answer

Sir Philip Sidney’s influence can be seen throughout the history of English literary criticism since the publication of the Apology. 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 titled A Defence of Poetry. In 1858, William Stigant, a Cambridge-educated translator, poet and essayist, writes in his essay titled "Sir Philip Sidney" in Cambridge Essays 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" (Garrett 347). Shelley writes in Defence that while "ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created," and leads to a 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" (Shelley, Norton 517).

— Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)