Sidney and Herbert on Failure: Modesty Topos or Writer’s Block?

Abstract

CAN THE FOCUS OF Astrophil and Stella andThe Temple on the difficulties that arise when composing poetry, usually viewed as a self-conscious performance of inadequacy, rather be seen as amused advice about how to steer clear of a writer's block?There is only one history of blocking, that by Zachary Leader, who takes a psychoanalytic approach, considering the condition as the result of the anxiety of influence. He argues that the problem was first conceptualised in the eighteenth century, when authors described themselves as daunted by feeling that they had little new to say, given the achievements of classical and Renaissance writers. Though Romantic writers subsequently disagreed with this position, some (Leader picks out Wordsworth and Coleridge) lamented how, in their own cases, the original sources of their creativity dried up in later life as freshness of perception waned, so they wrote nothing new, or wrote at length but badly. 1 Perhaps, though, a pre-history of writer's block might start with the 'modesty topos', so common in early modern texts? Currently, commentators see this topos as a pretence of weakness that elicits support from its readers. For instance, Patricia Pender and Matthew Harrison argue that a declared inability to write inverts the relationship between the perceived social or political weakness of writers before their patrons or readers and these writers' demonstrated rhetorical power. The topos typically involves authors proclaiming that