One of Surrey’s fellow poets, the humanist and courtier Sir Thomas Wyatt, was acquitted of treason and escaped Henry VIII’s execution machine, then travelled to Italy, France and Spain. In the French and Italian courts he found a form that would shape and fit English for its unparalleled poetic future: the sonnet. The sonnet was a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameters which had been in use since the thirteenth century. Wyatt — like so many others — looked towards the great Italian Petrarch’s sonnets and noted also the love motifs which inhabited so many of them, for which indeed
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