10/10/09

10/09/09

Take Wyatt and Surrey as poets. Describe their similarities and their differences.

If I had to pick a characteristic Wyatt poem, I would pick the lines he translates from Seneca, about the dangers of the court life. These are lines that Marvell--and Cowley, I believe--would later translate (I spent quite some time trying to figure out if I could detect the influence of Paradise Regained in Mavell's use of the word "pinnacle.")

I think this poem is interesting for a few reasons: first, the first-person perspective, both intellectually outside the political situation he describes and affected by it. Wyatt often in his amorous poems seems to be writing after apocalypse--his Petrarchanism comes as an externally imposed disaster, and his Stoicism comes through in his decision to be himself despite pain, or female dishonesty. It doesn't surprise me that the five-stanza poem Surrey wrote w/ the first letters of each stanza spelling his name begins in Petrarchan disarray, imagines that the speaker thinks about classical Troy, and then resolves to live, though the poem's ending claim--if that sacrifice was worth it, this one is--is far more Surreyian than Wyattalicious. Second, as I have hinted, the poem's Stoicism--Wyatt is certainly not a pure Stoic, but he shares many of their ideas, and in Farewell Love he references Senec's precepts as one reason for his change.

Wyatt's poetry weaves a thin thread of self through the compromises of being a relatively low-level courtier.


I'm exhausted, but I have to keep typing, to get my time down. I'm going to switch to outline form, for my own benefit.

Surrey:
narrative of Petrarchan paradox
logical organizational structure--WIATT poem as Sessions says is a syllogism
(Sidney and Shakespeare will compress this structure even further)
intense use of rhetorical effects
more even rhythm, and deliberate use of caesura, reversed feet
organizational structures that outline the relation of lines to each other, with lines
that are loosely connected w/o those structures
use of lists that create the sense of a unified observer behind those lists (the aesthetic approach of a patron!!)

more use of pathetic fallacy and of the landscape--Wyatt can be deeply
claustrophobic.
a slight ability to turn the English landscape into the stuff of romance--at least Chaucerian romance.
a profound ability to ventriloquize--the poems by women missing their husbands are incredible
innovative rhyme and verse forms
a more concrete vocabulary, away from the words of 15th c. chivalry
a slight discursive tendency, within his forms, in which he repeats himself with a new image

a social stake in building a new English vocabulary and poetic--many Surrey poems invite response or treat stock situations