Sidney's Wounds: Poetic Physicality, Revision, and Remembrance in the Sidney Circle

The existence of both earlier and later versions of poems written by the Sidney circle reveals a hitherto overlooked Elizabethan writing practice: namely, the revising of a poem to describe more richly the physical act of composition. In the Sidney circle, in particular, this writing practice was aimed at memorializing Sir Philip Sidney and participating in his literary legacy. In his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Sidney had become obsessed with describing the body of the poet as he composes aloud and then writes down what he speaks.