Thomas Wyatt and Henry Surrey

THOMAS WYATT and Henry Surrey are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Tudor lyric. Hand in hand, according to the textbooks, they imported the sonnet, established its Petrarchan and forms, and, as Puttenham said, greatly pollished our rude and homelie maner of vulgar Poesie, in cordial preparation for the greater Elizabethan masters. Of course, there are differences between them. According to one set of critics, Wyatt floundering out of a medieval bog on his way to Surreydom. He inferior to Surrey in harmony of numbers, perspicuity of expression, and facility of phraseology.1 His lyrics have many faults of style and language, and the versification of his sonnets is uniformly harsh and unmelodious, while Surrey, who conceived, attempted and executed the arduous design of reforming our language and of giving a new turn to our poetry, wrote amatory odes which may still be regarded as models of composition in that branch of writing, with sweetness of versification and elegance of thought and sentiment.2 Wyatt was the pioneer who fumbled in the linguistic difficulties that beset him and prepared the way for Surrey's smoother lines and more pleasing accentuation.3 As these quotations indicate, Wyatt's versification has been a major stumbling-block to the critics. For Surrey, inventor of blank verse and the above mentioned Shakespearean sonnet, also wrote lyrics in poulter's measure, tetrameter sixains, and cross-rhyme quatrains, wrote all of them metrically by modern standards, and wrote them with an elegance and balance which seem almost Augustan. Wyatt, though far more inventive and experimental in lyric forms his ballettes include over seventy different stanza patterns sometimes wrote metrically

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