[In the following review of Muir and Thomson's updated edition of Wyatt's Collected Poems, the reviewer discusses newly discovered poems from the Blage manuscript.]

Since Professor Muir discovered poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the Blage Manuscript at Trinity College, Dublin, ten or a dozen years ago, it has been clear that a thorough revision of the text of all Wyatt's poetry must be undertaken. Until that discovery our knowledge of Wyatt's poetry was mainly derived from two major manuscripts, one of which (Egerton 2711) had belonged to the poet himself, while the other (Devonshire 17492) had been compiled by or for certain ladies at the Court of Queen Anne Boleyn. The Blage Manuscript, compiled by Sir George Blage, who was a close friend of Wyatt, is of comparable importance with these two. These three manuscripts are, it is true, supplemented by other manuscript and printed sources, but between them they contribute 233 out of the 268 poems now included in the Collected Poems. This edition, prepared by Professor Muir in collaboration with Miss Thomson (author of the best study of Wyatt's poetry yet published) is likely to remain the definitive edition for the text of these poems.

There are indeed other problems, especially of attribution: how many of these poems are in fact by Wyatt? On this the editors offer a little guidance. In the third section of their introduction—"The Canon"—they state the nature of the problem: by all except the most extreme sceptics at least half the poems here printed can be accepted as by Wyatt. In the critical apparatus the editors helpfully provide brief evidence for Wyatt's authorship, which is sometimes supplemented in the commentary. They are not, perhaps, always as explicit, or as consistent, as one could have wished. "Syns Loue ys founde wythe parfytnes" (No. LI in Unpublished poems … from the Blage MS., 1961) is now excluded from the canon, but no reason is given. Yet No. CLXXI in the present text is said to be "presumably not by W.", again with no reason stated. No. CXCIV, printed among "Doubtful Poems" in Professor Muir's "Muses Library" edition, is here readmitted to the canon on the grounds that it is "at least as likely to be W's as many of the Devonshire MS poems printed as his" by earlier editors. However, Professor Muir and Miss Thomson probably decided that it was more important to provide an authentic text of some fine poems than to hesitate interminably about attributions. As they say, "we know comparatively little about the work of the other Court poets of the period". These questions of authorship will no doubt be discussed for many years; but no sensible person refuses to read a good poem until he knows who wrote it. Renaissance poets were not concerned with Romantic self-revelation.

Certainly Wyatt was not: he was either translating Italian poems, or adapting English ones much of the time, with occasional diversions into Horatian satire or paraphrases of the Psalms. He was much more at home in the native, and therefore medieval, tradition of lyric than in the Italian, Renaissance, tradition of sonnet and strambotto which he introduced to English. Skelton, his older contemporary, rejected the New Learning and remained obstinately medieval; Surrey, his younger contemporary, was entirely converted to the Renaissance manner, so that for Thomas Warton he was "the first English classical poet". Wyatt, in temper as in time, lay between the two: he was of less interest therefore to Elizabethan or Augustan poets, but in our own time his reputation has surpassed Surrey's. This is in part due to pseudo-Romantic interpretations of his poetry, and in part to a current preference for poetry that is nearer to the spoken word. In fact most of the best of Wyatt's poetry derives from his attempt to make acceptable to a Tudor Court audience the lyric tradition of the fifteenth century.

The commentary in this new edition provides almost all the help that anyone needs and is especially valuable in that it uncovers English as well as Italian antecedents for Wyatt's expression. Many of these notes are attributed to WMT, whose identity is disclosed in the Sigla as "W.M. Tydeman", but whose work (published or unpublished) is not listed. One might have wished for rather fuller information about musical settings for Wyatt's poems in view of recent controversy on this very relevant matter. Some settings are mentioned but not others and Miss Maynard's reply to Dr. Stevens is not referred to until the commentary on No. CLVIII. (Perhaps the commentary on earlier poems had been completed before her articles appeared?) However these are minor criticisms of a most valuable piece of scholarship, which provides a secure foundation for the study of a major poet, who, more than any other, bridged the gap between "Medieval" and "Renaissance".