“Sir Thomas Wyatt's Contribution to English Poetry”

1 Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 1 English Hons., Paper-2 Topic: Sir Thomas Wyatt’s contribution to English Poetry Lecture No: 107 By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117 “Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Contribution to English Poetry” INTRODUCTION: • The writer who exerted the greatest influence over sixteenth- century English poetry was a fourteenth-century Italian, Francesco Petrarca—usually known in English as Francis Petrarch. The first major English poet to translate Petrarch's Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes) was Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, followed by his younger contemporary Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Hence, Wyatt and Surrey are known as the “Fathers of the English Sonnet.” Surrey created the rhyming meter and quatrain divisions of the “Elizabethan” or “Shakespearean” form of sonnet. 2 • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt both, usually, are regarded as the progenitors of the productive era of Elizabethan poetry which is often termed to be the golden age in the development of English lyrics. • Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) was one of the most accomplished English poets of the Renaissance. Writing over half a century before Shakespeare, Wyatt helped to popularize Italian verse forms, most notably the sonnet, in Tudor England. • He took subject matter from Petrarch's sonnets, but his rhyme schemes are significantly different. Petrarch's sonnets consist of an "octave" rhyming abba abba, followed by a "sestet" with various rhyme schemes. Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee. This marks the beginning of an English contribution to sonnet structure of three quatrains and a closing couplet. • Wyatt's poems are short but fairly numerous. His 96 love poems appeared posthumously (1557) in a compendium called Tottel's Miscellany. The most noteworthy are thirty- one sonnets the first in English. Ten of them were translations from Petrarch, while all were written in the Petrarchan form, apart from the couplet ending which Wyatt introduced. serious and reflective in tone, the sonnet shows some stiffness of construction and the metrical uncertainty indicative of difficulty Wyatt found in the new form. Yet their conciseness represents a great advance on the prolixity and uncouthness of much earlier poetry. 3 • Wyatt was also responsible for the most important introduction of the personal note into English. Poetry, for, though following his models closely, he wrote of his own experiences. • Surrey was for generations considered the more accomplished poet, but Wyatt, who was almost fifteen years older, is for many modern readers the more rewarding. His meters are less polished than Surrey’s, but the human voice speaks through this very lack of smoothness. The best lines in his characteristically rugged, dramatic style have been compared with the poetry of John Donne. One sonnet begins forcefully: • Farewell Love and all thy laws forever: Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more. • Like Donne, Wyatt often conveys a strong sense of personal emotion in his works, even in those which are translated from the Italian and full of the conventional poses of the sonneteer. • The most important contribution of Wyatt to English poetry is, probably, the introduction of sonnet in imitation of the Italian poet Petrarch. 4 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PETRARCH AND WYATT • As the sonnet evolved in the hands of Wyatt, two more changes occurred in the sonnet form. • The octave came to be divided into clear-cut quatrains. • The sestet had already been divided into two parts, one of four lines and the second of the final couplet. • He began to ridicule the cult of adulation for the sonnet heroine. He treats the matter of love in an acute unemotional manner by deciding to leave his lady love when she seems unwilling to direct her love to the poet. This appears artificial because human passion is stirred by refusal whereas Wyatt abolishes the concept of convincing his darling when she is not moved by his love. A traditional love poet would kneel and subdue to the mistress for her love but this is otherwise in the poetry of Wyatt. • As he furthered more translations, he began to introduce his own attitude of skepticism towards women, as evident from the following sonnet: “Who so list to hunt? I know where is a hind! /But as for me, alas! I have may no more” The sonnet voices the lover surrender. His pursuit, long and tedious, has brought to the conclusion that his mistress is incapable of love with life-long companionship. He compares her to a female deer. For beauty, the hind is matchless and irresistibly tempting but it fails to understand what love is. These sentiments are quite the opposite of those expressed by Petrarch. 5 • With this sonnet, Wyatt’s experimentation with the sonnet form comes to an end. He ceases to be a translator and becomes almost original, though he makes Petrarchan sonnet as the basis of his own. • His own vigorous personality transformed the Petrarchan medium and founded a new form consisting of three quatrains of decasyllables and the final couplet. CONCLUSON: However, he showed that Petrarchan form of sonnet could be modified to give expressions to complex personal experience and could be used to the tradition of his own nation. This achievement of his has entitled him to be one of the pioneers of Elizabethan poetry. Though having certain limitations and impurities, the sonnet form introduced by Wyatt became so popular in English that it has survived till today. *** By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117 .

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