Thomas Wyatt

Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542)

1. Called as the pioneer of New English poetry.
2. Introduced sonnet form in England.
3. Imitated works of Seneca and Horace
4. Experimented with: rondeau, epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima, satires, monorime, riplets with refrains, quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with codes and French forms of douzaine and treizaine.
5. Wyatt was not a mere translator or immitator, He took Petrarch’s form and words as a basis to represent his own culture, used artificial love themes and Petrarchan conceits in his poetry, but departed from Petrarch in his rhyme schemes.
6. Petrarch’s sonnets consisted of an octave rhyming abba abba, followed after a turn by a sestet with various rhyme schemes. However his poem never ended with a rhyming couplet.
7. Wyatt employed the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme was cdcd ee. This marked the beginning of an exclusively ‘English’ contribution  to sonnet structure, this is 3 quatrains and a closing couplet.
8. Works:
   1. Whose List to Hunt
      1. As a boy he made the acquaintance of a lady Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter Anne. But she got married with King Henry VIII in 1533.
      2. Being devastated he wrote this poem.
   2. The Court of Venus
      1. The only poem published during his lifetime.
   3. Certain Psalms
      1. metrical translations of penitential psalms.