France, England and the tragedy of DSK

When we consider poets who perished before their day, thoughts turn to the Romantics or the war victims: Burns, Keats, Shelley: Owen, Keith Douglas. (Had both lived, Douglas would have ended up a greater poet than Owen: discuss.) But 16th-century poets had an even higher casualty rate: Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, Southwell, Marlowe, Mark Alexander Boyd. Amidst a few immortal lines, we strain in sadness to think what might have been.

In two respects, Sidney can be bracketed with Yeats. First, he really was a soldier, scholar, horseman. Second, he too coined an immortal political aperçu. Yeats was the supremely perceptive political poet — ‘Great hatred: little room’; ‘The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity’ — much the most brilliant short account of the 20th century — and ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ But Sidney runs him close: ‘That sweet enemy, France,’ which summarises Anglo-French relations from Shakespeare’s Henry V until today.