| Summary: | This article focuses on the first great English poetical treatise, An Apology for Poetry by Sir Philip Sidney, and questions the author’s use of the notion of Ut musica poesis. Seeking to defend the nobleness of poetry thanks to the Aristotelian conception of mimesis, Sidney usually prefers another great analogy, that of Ut pictura poesis. However, his hesitations when it comes to quantity or accentual, rhyming verse, as well as his ambivalent treatment of the Psalmist – who functions as a legitimizing model in Early Modern England at large for lyrical poetry – reveal how the music of poetry has already begun to gain a form of autonomy with regards to older conceptions of music and of the universe.
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