Nicola Shulman begins her rehabilitation of Thomas Wyatt by remarking that there is ‘an almost universal consensus that he can’t write’ — a consensus established within a generation of his death in 1542.
Nicola Shulman begins her rehabilitation of Thomas Wyatt by remarking that there is ‘an almost universal consensus that he can’t write’ — a consensus established within a generation of his death in 1542. Even the Earl of Surrey, his friend and eulogist, acknowledged his verse to be ‘unparfited’, and by Shakespeare’s day he was a joke: Malvolio keeps a poem of Wyatt’s about him, proclaiming himself a nincompoop.
Like Malvolio, Wyatt excels at such un- attractive emotions as ‘grievance, reproach, disappointment and unrequited desire’, and his expression of them is obscure as well as clumsy. Shulman illustrates this by considering one of his most obscure lyrics (LXXVI, in R.A. Rebholz’s Penguin edition), which finds him in his ‘customary pose of resentful defeat’:
Such Hap as I am happed in
Hath never man of truth, I ween.
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