THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

three cultivated plain words and a plain English style and drew on a popular English tradition. Nevertheless, it was to
the work of Wyatt and Surrey that later sixteenth-century poets admiringly returned and to the poems of Skelton that
they condescendingly looked back as a relic of semi-barbarity.
Relatively few of Wyatt’s poems appeared in print in his lifetime, but his work, together with that of Surrey, was
effectively canonized in 1557 with the appearance of the influential anthology Songes and Sonettes, written by the
right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, a collection familiarly known as Tottel’s
Miscellany. Richard Tottel’s Preface to the collection proclaimed that ‘the honorable stile’ of Surrey and the
‘weightinesse’ of the work of the ‘depewitted’ Wyatt offered proof that English poetry could now stand proper
comparison with the ancient Latin and the modern Italian. Tottel told his readers that his volume had been published
‘to the honor of the English tong, and for the profit of the studious of Englishe eloquence’. With the aid of the nine
editions of the Miscellany published between 1557 and 1587 a generation of Elizabethan poets and would-be poets
(including Shakespeare’s Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor) schooled themselves in the courtly
expression of love and in the proper verbal posturing of a lover. They were also introduced to the novelty of the
Italianate discipline of the fourteen-line sonnet, to ottava rima, to terza rima, and to unrhymed iambic pentameter. To
successive critics, historians, and anthologists the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey was deemed to stand at the fountainhead
of a developing lyric tradition, while that of Skelton was presumed to have fed into some kind of literary slough
of despond.
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Wyatt, the well-travelled and sophisticated courtier-diplomat, introduced a full-blooded Petrarchanism to England.
He was well read in the tradition of Tuscan lyric poetry that stemmed from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and he translated,
and freely adapted into English, verses by Petrarch himself and by several of his fifteenth-century disciples, most
notably poems by Serafino d’Aquilano (1466-1500). Wyatt’s ‘epigrams’, often eight-line poems modelled on the
strambotti of Serafino, also suggest a response to the kind of pithy moral observation cultivated at the French court by
Clement Marot (1496-1544) rather than to the comparatively prolix tirades of Skelton. Most of these ‘epigrams’
reflect on the uncertainties and ambiguities of power and on the process of negotiating a way through the thickets of
contemporary politics. If, it is optimistically suggested in one of these poems, venomous thorns sometimes bear
flowers, so, by a devout analogy, ‘every wo is joynid with some welth’; elsewhere, more sanguinely, an enigmatic
pistol informs its owner that ‘if I be thine enemy I may thy life ende’; in another, a wretched prisoner, whose life
seems to be worn away by the ‘stynke and close ayer’ of his cell, proclaims that his only hope is ‘innocencie’ while
recognizing that although ‘this wound shall heale agayne ... the scarre shall styll remayne’; in yet another, a man
conspicuously out of favour at court bitterly sees his former acquaintance crawling from him ‘like lyse [lice] awaye
from ded bodies’. In lines based on a translation of a section of Seneca’s play Thyestes, the speaker sees jockeying for
power at court as akin to standing on a ‘slipper [slippery] toppe’, and the potential for redemptive self knowledge as
lying well beyond its narrow and dangerous confines. As Wyatt’s satires and certain of his bleaker lyrics (such as
‘Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne’) indicate, heavenly thunder rolls around kings’ thrones (‘circa Regna tonat’),
bloody days break hearts, and severed heads serve as dire warnings of the force of royal displeasure. In the epistolary
address to his friend, ‘Myne owne John Poyntz’, he purports to ‘fle the presse of courtes ... | Rather then to lyve thrall
under the awe | Of lordly lookes’ and he proclaims that he cannot honour those that ‘settes their part | With Venus
and Baccus all ther lyf long’. One of his most anxious poems (‘In mornyng [mourning] wyse’) pays tribute to the five
men beheaded in 1536 for alleged sexual relations with the disgraced Queen Anne Boleyn (a disgrace in which Wyatt
himself was also implicated, though his arrest led merely to a spell in the Tower). Few poems of the period convey as
vividly the arbitrary shifts in fate and in the exercise of royal power:
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And thus ffarwell eche one in hartye wyse!
The Axe ys home, your hedys be in the stret;
The trykklyngge tearys dothe ffall so from my yes [eyes]
I skarse may wryt, my paper ys so wet.
But what can hepe [help] when dethe hath playd his part,
Thoughe naturs cours wyll thus lament and mone?
Leve sobes therffor, and every crestyn (Christian] hart
Pray ffor the sowlis (souls] of thos be dead and goone.
Wyatt’s poem is ostensibly a Christian valediction which indulges in, rather than forbids, mourning, but it is also a
poem which edgily acknowledges the political danger of mourning traitors.