Poetry Criticism | Wyatt, Sir Thomas ca. - David Matthew Rosen (essay date 1981)

David Matthew Rosen (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: "Time, Indentity, and Context in Wyatt's Verse," in Studies in English Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Winter, 1981, pp. 5-20.

[In the following essay, Rosen commentds Wyatt's use of narrative time as an artistic reflection of the features of sixteenth-century England.]

In the last fifteen years critics have tended to find in Wyatt's verse an expression of his personality.¹ Wyatt has been perceived as working in a tradition or group of traditions—from amour courtois to contemptu mundi—which he gathered and transformed in ways that suggested an original thought, original voice, original personality.² What that personality contained precisely, what mixture of cynicism, stoicism, and naïveté, is more difficult to assess. Nonetheless, in Wyatt's best verse the reader feels an intimate contact with the poet, a sense of the poet's personality that seeps through...

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