Wyatt, Sir Thomas ca. - Pamela Dembo (essay date 1971)
Pamela Dembo (essay date 1971)
SOURCE: "Wyatt's Multi-faceted Presentation of Love," in UNISA English Studies, Vol. IX, No. 4, December, 1971, pp. 5-10.
[In the following essay, various attitudes toward love are explored in Wyatt's poetry.]
In this article, I should like to explore the variety of Wyatt's attitudes to love. Wyatt differs from a number of Elizabethan poets in that his poetry is not centred around the beloved but on the experience of love itself. He portrays mutual and unrequited love, quarrels and reconciliation, contentment and satiety, and the perils of wooing. He presents woman's fickleness as well as her constancy; and the poet himself, as lover, hovers between assurance and doubt, forceful insistence and gentleness, impatience and tolerance, independence and loss of liberty.
In the following poem, Wyatt adopts a characteristic attitude of wariness to love and his beloved. That they are curious phenomena is...
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