Thomas Wyatt is the finest English poet between Chaucer and the Elizabethans. Many poems have been wrongly attributed to him, however, and the authenticity of different versions of his lyrics has been a matter of dispute. Richard Harrier makes a significant contribution both by establishing accurate texts and by determining the canon itself. The only solid foundation for the Wyatt canon is his personal copybook, the Egerton MS, here reproduced in a diplomatic text. The apparatus records all changes within the manuscript and all contemporary variants; explanatory notes are provided. This volume, which includes a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the sources, will stand as the ultimate authority for the text and canon of Wyatt's poems.
In this thrillingly entertaining book, Nicola Shulman interweaves the bloody events of Henry VIII's reign with the story of English love poetry and the life of its first master, Henry VIII's most glamorous and enigmatic subject: Sir Thomas Wyatt. Poet, statesman, spy, lover of Anne Boleyn and favorite both of Henry VIII and his sinister minister Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant Wyatt was admired and envied in equal measure. His love poetry began as risqué entertainment for ambitious men and women at the slippery top of the court. But when the axe began to fall and Henry VIII's laws made his subjects fall silent in terror, Wyatt's poetic skills became a way to survive. He saw that a love poem was a place where secrets could hide.
Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) was the first modern voice in English poetry. 'Chieftain' of a 'new company of courtly makers', he brought the Italian poetic Renaissance to England, but he was also revered as prophet-poet of the Reformation. His poetry holds a mirror to the secret, capricious world of Henry VIII's court, and alludes darkly to events which it might be death to describe. In the Tower, twice, Wyatt was betrayed and betrayer. This remarkably original biography is more - and less - than a Life, for Wyatt is so often elusive, in flight, like his Petrarchan lover, into the 'heart's forest'. Rather, it is an evocation of Wyatt among his friends, and his enemies, at princely courts in England, Italy, France and Spain, or alone in contemplative retreat. Following the sources - often new discoveries, from many archives - as far as they lead, Susan Brigden seeks Wyatt in his 'diverseness', and explores his seeming confessions of love and faith and politics. Supposed, at the time and since, to be the lover of Anne Boleyn, he was also the devoted 'slave' of Katherine of Aragon. Aspiring to honesty, he was driven to secrets and lies, and forced to live with the moral and mortal consequences of his shifting allegiances. As ambassador to Emperor Charles V, he enjoyed favour, but his embassy turned to nightmare when the Pope called for a crusade against the English King and sent the Inquisition against Wyatt. At Henry VIII's court, where only silence brought safety, Wyatt played the idealized lover, but also tried to speak truth to power. Wyatt's life, lived so restlessly and intensely, provides a way to examine a deep questioning at the beginning of the Renaissance and Reformation in England. Above all, this new biography is attuned to Wyatt's dissonant voice and broken lyre, the paradox within him of inwardness and the will to 'make plain' his heart, all of which make him exceptionally difficult to know - and fascinating to explore.
Chris Stamatakis reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator from the literary avant-garde of early Tudor England. He discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception. Where previous studies have read Wyatt's poetry from a largely biographical standpoint, this book examines the reading practices of his Tudor audiences and editors, and it considers the different types of textuality shown by the manuscript collections that contain his verse. By setting Wyatt's writings in the context of sixteenth-century theories of language and literary practice, and by drawing on early Tudor educational, rhetorical, and courtierly handbooks, Stamatakis examines the rhetoric of rewriting that colours Wyatt's texts. Repeatedly, his writings invite readers to 'turn' or perform the word-to draw out something that lies inert within it. These habits of rewriting and verbal performance often serve to sustain an intimate dialogue between writers and readers in this literary culture. The book pays particular attention to the fascinating materiality of Wyatt's texts: the margins around, and the interlinear spaces within, his poems are regularly filled with new text-handwritten scrawls that are supplied by Wyatt himself or by his copyists, editors and readers. Chapters are devoted to the types of rewriting found in each of Wyatt's main genres: Plutarchian essays; forensic apologias; psalm paraphrases; letters and verse epistles, and lyrics or 'balets'. Two appendices offer further detail about patterns of manuscript transmission and the copying of Wyatt's poems. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting argues that reading often shaded into writing (and rewriting) in the early sixteenth century, and it shows how acts of apparent copying often transformed texts inventively and imaginatively.
Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
Some of the most important authors in British poetry left their mark onliterature before 1600, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and, of course, William Shakespeare. "The Facts On File Companion to British Poetry before 1600"is an encyclopedic guide to British poetry from the beginnings to theyear 1600, featuring approximately 600 entries ranging in length from300 to 2,500 words.
“Meticulously maps the eddies and currents that have defined this vexing poem’s vexed history of neglect, rediscovery, and canonization . . . grippingly unusual.” —Renaissance Quarterly Thomas Wyatt didn’t publish “They Flee from Me.” It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in countless poetry anthologies. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells—in vivid and compelling detail—of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across five hundred turbulent years. Wyatt’s poem becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII’s court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the “best” English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.
