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The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt
296 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 1963
About the author
Kenneth Muir
142 books1 followerKenneth Arthur Muir was a literary scholar and author, prominent in the fields of Shakespeare studies and English Renaissance theatre. He served as King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University from 1951 to 1974.
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September 14, 2021
My honors thesis at Amherst College included Wyatt, "The Uses of Prosody in Reading Wyatt, Donne, Spenser and Milton." My advisor Richard Cody had undergrad degree from London University, and his Ph.D. from U. Minn, where I would proceed for my graduate study, my doctoral thesis advised by Donne expert Leonard Unger, Saul Bellow's best friend there.
My senior chapter on Wyatt begins with W.E. Simonds' on Wyatt's best sonnet, "Whoso list to hunt," that "the versification [is] often rough and faulty." I add, that's true throughout Wyatt, in his failures as well as his best. Some critics say Wyatt mainly achieved as a translator and innovator of Italian and French verse.
His best sonnet follows the convention of "deer"/ "dear," loving like hunting, of which he is wearied,
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas, I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of the last that come behind....
I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
And ends with a reference to Caesar's Latin and his private deer:
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."
This last line is brilliant, and characteristic of Wyatt's prosody, with its medial
caesura: " hold [] though," both stressed; and its anapaest, "for to hold," and the spondaic
end rhyme, "seem [] tame," imaginative rhyme for "I am."
Wyatt's prosodic devices, monorhymes and medial casuras, produce linear parallelism, or less forward movement to the poem as a whole, hence less pointed ness in the climax, always at the end in sonnets, though not in Donne, where "The Apparition" climaxes in the middle.
My senior chapter on Wyatt begins with W.E. Simonds' on Wyatt's best sonnet, "Whoso list to hunt," that "the versification [is] often rough and faulty." I add, that's true throughout Wyatt, in his failures as well as his best. Some critics say Wyatt mainly achieved as a translator and innovator of Italian and French verse.
His best sonnet follows the convention of "deer"/ "dear," loving like hunting, of which he is wearied,
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas, I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of the last that come behind....
I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
And ends with a reference to Caesar's Latin and his private deer:
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."
This last line is brilliant, and characteristic of Wyatt's prosody, with its medial
caesura: " hold [] though," both stressed; and its anapaest, "for to hold," and the spondaic
end rhyme, "seem [] tame," imaginative rhyme for "I am."
Wyatt's prosodic devices, monorhymes and medial casuras, produce linear parallelism, or less forward movement to the poem as a whole, hence less pointed ness in the climax, always at the end in sonnets, though not in Donne, where "The Apparition" climaxes in the middle.
Displaying 1 of 1 review