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Courtier, theorist, diplomat, soldier, and martyr, Sir Philip Sidney exemplified but also changed the cultural ideals of his Elizabethan moment. Hoping to evaluate Sidney’s extravagant claim that “the poet, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention doth grow, in effect, into another nature”, this course reads Sir Philip Sidney’s innovations across a range of genres: literary theory (“An Apology for Poetry”), poetry (“Astrophel and Stella”), scriptural translation (“The Sidney Psalms”) and prose romance (“The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”). The course concludes with an examination of his many afterlives as exemplary subject for biography, adaptation, homage and critical argument.