Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip SidneyFew Elizabethans left the image of their personalities cut so deeply into the Renaissance imagination as did Sir Philip Sidney. Widely admired in his own time, Sidney must seem to the modern reader almost universally accomplished. His talents as courtier, diplomat, soldier, scholar, novelist, and poet are history. Almost immediately after Sidney's death in battle against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, the process of legend began, and the legend