Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)

The older of the two "courtly makers" of Henry's court, Wyatt can be identified as the father of modern English poetry: it is with his translations from Petrarch that the tradition in English begins.

Wyatt and others who followed him "exercised" the vernacular in two ways:

• They translated from classical models like Petrarch, and
• They experimented with a great variety of lyric measures in an effort to restore flexibility lost after Chaucer.

Since Chaucer's day, English had undergone many semantic and grammatical changes. By the sixteenth century, writers intent on writing in English had to work out their own stylistics and metrics. Changes had effected the way words were pronounced or accented, and such alterations made the role of the sixteenth century poet difficult.

These early poets were basically craftsmen rather than artists in the standard sense:

• Rather than originate fresh themes, they repeatedly treated a conventional subject matter in an effort to create a fluid style,
• They borrowed, imitated and translated from Italian and French poets, as well as one another, and
• They circulated their poetry in manuscript form and relied on each other rather than the larger public for encouragement and criticism.

Wyatt's poetic contributions are a bit uneven:

• He often seems unsure of where the stress or accent should fall in a line,
• He often cannot sustain an idea through the entire design of the poem, which is critical in the sonnet, and
• His spellings are inconsistent (a trait of the times!), which makes the line's stress often unclear.

What to expect from Wyatt's sonnets:

• He uses typical Petrarchan conventions (the lover as a ship tossed on the seas of love; the lover alternately freezing and burning hot, among them];
• His language and syntax are more difficult, making his sonnets a bit tougher to "crack;"
• He generally translates from Italian models, which means his themes or issues don't usually originate with him;
• He generally follows the rhyme scheme abba cddc effe gg
• He often presents the two sides of love--physical and spiritual--but no union between them, which makes his work slightly different from the Petarchan mold.

On the whole, Wyatt's lighter verses are more successful than his sonnets.

The first English sonneteer, Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) learned of the form during travels in Spain and Italy. He is more widely known for his other lyrics but wrote 32 sonnets in the form that has come to be known as the Petrarchan sonnet. There has been debate as to whether Wyatt's iambic pentameter was ingeniously varied or simply clumsy. It is helpful to keep in mind when reading Wyatt that he was exploring new literary territory and that the accenting of syllables in English has changed since his time.