Poet of the Past

Sir Thomas Wyatt

STATESMAN and poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, was at the centre of court life during the reign of Henry VIII. Embroiled in political crises, narrowly avoiding execution and negotiating deadly Tudor intrigues throughout his career, amazingly he also found time to write poetry.

Wyatt has been called the father of the English sonnet, since he introduced the Petrarchan form to England after his diplomatic adventures in Italy. He was determined to civilise and enrich English, using a sparkling variety of continental verse-forms to enhance the power and subtlety of his native language.

It is arguable that the Earl of Surrey, who transformed the Petrarchan Canzoniere into the sonnet form used by and since Shakespeare, would not have taken up the sonnet with such enthusiasm had its earlier form not been introduced by Wyatt.

Certainly Wyatt’s verse was responsible for a revival of a first courtly, then popular interest in poetry, without which it may not have bloomed so deliciously under subsequent Elizabethan and metaphysical pens.

Born to a wealthy Yorkshire family, he was educated at Cambridge and succeeded his father as an important courtier, gaining the trust of his young king. When Henry sought a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Wyatt was one of the ambassadors sent to Rome to negotiate. In 1535 he was knighted, and a year later became High Sheriff of Kent.

Wyatt made himself not only a Renaissance man but also a Reformation man, loyal to Henry and Protestantism, but it is quite possible that the private battles of conscience Wyatt had to fight are as much responsible for the twists in his verse as are the amorous entanglements of a courtier’s love-life.

Tall and handsome, Thomas Wyatt looked like Henry VIII. He may have shared not only his monarch’s striking demeanour,

but also his most famous wife. It is popularly supposed, but still unproven, that the “naked foot stalking in my chamber” in his famous poem below, belonged to an unfaithful Anne Boleyn. Wyatt certainly spent much time with the vivacious and attractive Anne, and was himself unhappily married.

There are various strands of evidence in his own poetry to suggest he had fallen in love with a lady of high position, and, more than once, he uses the name “Anna” to address a mistress in verse.

Henry suspected the adultery and had Wyatt thrown into the Tower, from where Wyatt watched similarly charged prisoners meet their grisly ends on the scaffold. He may even have witnessed Anne’s own execution. Then, amazingly, he was reprieved, given a full pardon, and returned to office.

This was surely more than the whim of England’s most dangerously unpredictable king; it was probably a fortunate result of Wyatt’s powerful friends.

However, Wyatt still died young in 1542, aged under forty.

Surprisingly, considering the importance of his position and his considerable influence, Wyatt’s work was not properly published until after his death. There had been some private circulation of his poems during his lifetime, and the Egerton Manuscript featured several written in his own hand, but it was not until 1557 that they appeared, alongside Surrey’s, in Tottel’s Miscellany, the famous Elizabethan anthology.

In the 21st century, Wyatt is benefiting from a revival of interest. Nicola Shulman and Susan Brigden have produced searching and erudite biographies. He appears as a character in Hilary Mantel’s fictional accounts of his fellow courtier, Thomas Cromwell.

And Wyatt does feel modern. His poetry has the delightful harmonies and the haunting dissonance of Tudor music.

In reading or performance, it is open to varied interpretation. His expressions of the exquisite pains of love lost or unrequited are elegant but edgy. The emphases are not always obvious; his words finely honed, his lines almost minimalist.

If he was a pioneer in his own era, he is a poet worth rediscovery and exploration in ours.