Thomas Wyatt (poet)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir Thomas Wyatt died on the 11th of October 1542, at around age thirty-nine, and was buried at Sherborne Abbey. He had lived fast and dangerously close to the most lethal court in English history. He had stood in the Tower of London while Anne Boleyn was beheaded. He had negotiated with popes and emperors, been captured by the armies of Charles V, and escaped. He had written sonnets that nobody would print under his name until fifteen years after his death.

  What made a man like Wyatt reach for the Italian sonnet form? Why did his poems circulate in manuscript for decades before publishers dared attach his name? And how did a diplomat who spent his life serving Henry VIII manage to shape the entire course of English poetry?

• 2. A Kent Family at Court

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  Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent was where Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503, into a family that had already survived one royal reign by the skin of its teeth. His father Henry had been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, yet recovered well enough to become a Privy Councillor under Henry VII and a trusted figure when Henry VIII took the throne in 1509.

  The family's Yorkshire roots and their Lancastrian loyalty in the Wars of the Roses had made them fighters for the winning side. That positioning paid forward: Thomas followed his father to court, and by 1515 he had entered Henry's service as Sewer Extraordinary, the same year he began studying at St John's College, Cambridge.

  Wyatt stood over six feet tall and was reportedly both handsome and physically strong. His father's connection to Sir Thomas Boleyn as constable of Norwich Castle meant the young Wyatt was acquainted with Boleyn's daughter Anne from an early stage. His sister Margaret married Sir Anthony Lee and became the mother of Sir Henry Lee, later Queen Elizabeth's champion. The Wyatts were embedded in the Tudor world at every level, and Thomas would spend his life navigating its rewards and its dangers.

• 3. Diplomacy and Peril

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  In 1526, Wyatt accompanied Sir John Russell, the 1st Earl of Bedford, on a mission to Rome to petition Pope Clement VII for the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. When Russell was incapacitated, Wyatt was sent on alone to negotiate with the Republic of Venice. The following year brought catastrophe: the armies of Emperor Charles V seized Rome and imprisoned the pope, and according to some accounts, Wyatt was captured in the chaos. He managed to escape and return to England.

  From 1528 to 1530, he served as high marshal at Calais. He was knighted in 1535 and appointed High Sheriff of Kent for 1536. That same year he was also sent as ambassador to Charles V in Spain, a posting tangled with personal history because Charles was a cousin of Princess Mary, whose recent declaration of illegitimacy had offended him deeply.

  In May 1536, Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of adultery with Anne Boleyn. He was released later that year, with his father's friendship with Thomas Cromwell providing crucial protection. He may have watched from his cell window as Anne Boleyn was executed on the 19th of May 1536, along with five men accused alongside her. He wrote a poem that may have been inspired by that sight.

  Cromwell's death in 1541 removed Wyatt's main protector, and he was recalled from abroad and imprisoned again. He was released and granted a full pardon only after the intervention of Queen Catherine Howard and on the condition that he reconcile with his wife. He was elected knight of the shire for Kent in December 1541. Months later, he was dead.

• 4. The Sonnet Arrives in English

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  Wyatt's stated aim was to experiment with the English language itself, to raise its powers to match those of other European tongues. His method was close translation and imitation of the Italian poet Petrarch, whose sonnets had dominated European verse for two centuries.

  Petrarch's sonnets follow a precise structure: an octave rhyming abba abba, followed by a sestet with varied rhyme schemes. Wyatt kept the Petrarchan octave but developed his own sestet, most commonly cddc ee. That closing couplet became a signature modification. His thirty-one sonnets were the first in the English language. Ten were direct translations from Petrarch; all used the Petrarchan form except for that couplet ending, which Wyatt introduced.

  Critics have noted stiffness of construction and metrical uncertainty in those early sonnets, signs of genuine difficulty with a form new to English. But scholars have also recognized the conciseness as a real advance over the prolixity of much earlier poetry. Beyond the sonnet, Wyatt worked in rondeaux, terza rima, ottava rima, epigrams, satires, songs, and stanza forms he invented himself, including poulter's measure: rhyming couplets of a twelve-syllable iambic line followed by a fourteen-syllable line. He is considered a master of the iambic tetrameter.

  Wyatt also admired Geoffrey Chaucer, and his vocabulary shows it. He uses Chaucer's own word newfangleness, meaning fickleness, in the poem They Flee from Me.

• 5. Love, Resentment, and Satire

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  Many of Wyatt's poems turn on romantic love and the suffering of a suitor devoted to a mistress who is either unavailable or cruel. C. S. Lewis described the body of this work as full of resentment, noting that Wyatt never goes out of himself: how badly his mistress treated him, how well he deserved better, how much more fortunate he had been with other women, and how sorry she would be one day.

  The poems that most fascinated later readers were those that seemed to brush against Anne Boleyn. Wyatt calls a mistress Anna in one poem and may allude to her trip to France in 1532 prior to her marriage to Henry VIII. His sonnet Whoso List To Hunt carries a line carved in its final tercet: "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am." His later sonnet If Waker Care describes his first love for "Brunette that set our country in a roar." Whether Wyatt and Boleyn shared a romantic relationship is uncertain, but their acquaintance is not.

  Wyatt's grandson George Wyatt recorded a story in which Thomas obtained a jewel belonging to Anne, a tablet or locket hanging loose from her pocket, and wore it at his own neck. Henry VIII recognized the jewel during a game of bowls. Anne said Wyatt had taken it without permission. The story's details, as the source notes, are hard to reconcile with courtly behavior.

  Beyond the love poems, Wyatt wrote satires composed in the Italian terza rima form, scathing indictments of the hypocrisy and flattery required of ambitious men at the Tudor court. Thomas Warton, the eighteenth-century critic, called Wyatt "the first polished English satirist." Those satires drew on exactly the world Wyatt had lived in.

• 6. Manuscripts, Miscellanies, and a Disputed Canon

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  Wyatt's poems circulated at court during his lifetime and may have appeared anonymously in an anthology called The Court of Venus, the earliest edition dating to around 1537. They were not published under his name until after his death. The first major book to feature and attribute his verse was Tottel's Miscellany, printed in 1557, fifteen years after he died.

  Two manuscript sources anchor what can be known with certainty. The Egerton Manuscript is an album in Wyatt's own hand, containing his personal selection of poems and translations, preserving 123 texts. Tottel's Miscellany ascribes ninety-six poems to him, thirty-three of which do not appear in the Egerton Manuscript. On the basis of objective documentary evidence, 156 poems can be attributed to Wyatt with certainty.

  Another 129 poems have been attributed to him purely on editorial judgment, drawn mainly from the Devonshire Manuscript Collection and the Blage manuscript. The scholar Kenneth Muir added scores of poems from those sources across three successive editions, the first in 1949, the second in 1963, and a third in 1969. R. A. Rebholz adopted Muir's expanded canon of 285 poems wholesale.

  In 1975, Joost Daalder published an edition from Oxford attempting to renovate the canon on documentary grounds, and Richard Harrier published a full philological study through Harvard University Press titled The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry. Harrier's analysis, confirmed by later scholars including Helen Baron in 1989 and 1994 and Jason Powell in 2009, demonstrates that 101 of the 285 poems in Rebholz's edition are not Wyatt's work. Harrier also identified another thirty-three poems from outside the main manuscripts that can be attributed on solid evidence. A new edition incorporating those findings has yet to appear.

• 7. Reputation and Afterlife

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  Thomas Warton in the eighteenth century ranked Wyatt as confessedly inferior to his contemporary Henry Howard, but still credited him as the first polished English satirist, noting that his genius was of the moral and didactic species.

  The twentieth century reversed that judgment considerably. Poets including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Yvor Winters, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen all found his work praiseworthy. C. S. Lewis called him the father of the Drab Age, meaning the plain or inornate style in contrast to what Lewis called the golden age of the later sixteenth century. Patricia Thomson, in direct counter to Lewis, described Wyatt as the Father of English Poetry.

  Wyatt's legitimate son Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger led a rebellion against Mary I, aiming to place the Protestant-minded Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn's daughter, on the throne. He was executed for it. Wyatt became an ancestor of Wallis Simpson, wife of the Duke of Windsor, and his great-grandson Sir Francis Wyatt served as governor of the Virginia Colony. The lines of descent run long and far from Allington Castle in Kent, but the thirty-one sonnets Wyatt planted in English remain the point of origin from which the form grew into everything that followed.