Wyatt is our Mandelstam
 

His love poems are full of skitterings and fear, and the Henretian court — the first true modern form of tyranny — the Stalin-purged state microcosmed to the width of the court, — is in them everywhere:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...t-doth-harbour
https://poets.org/poem/they-flee-me
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ere-is-an-hind
These poems surpass much of Petrarch, I think, it is only when Petrarch leans into the full surreality of love that he seems a great artist to me.
But Wyatt is more than just a translator. He breaks down the walls of the personal and traditional, so that his trauma becomes our trauma:
https://englishrenaissancewords.word...nd-whoso-list/
https://isleofinisfree.wordpress.com...d-ease-retain/
These are more than just gnomic utterance from Rebus and Seneca. They are also terrifyingly effective. "These bloody days have broken my heart", will remain with me all my life. There is a terrible beauty of savage technique, understatement, and personal horror. And this last is a culmination of rage:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...own-john-poynz

At least outside of China, I think your observation about Henry's new fangled police state is correct.

Weeelll, I like Wyatt. He can be read as an imagist poet, and I like your reading of the early Tudor Court, although I'd challenge too - are you sure that this was the first court to be dictatorial and dogmatic? How about the whole tradition of 'court'? And feudal life wasn't exactly porous and open.

i like Wyatt because he uses dynamic ideas and images, I think. His poems move, perhaps, become located in both the personal and metaphoric. But this is also an 'easy' reading, rooted in a history which assumes that English poetry moved from aural/trope to blurred personal to metaphor.

I should be working. Back tomorrow.

Sarah-Jane

Sarah, it's not that the court before Henry wasn't tyrannical — of course courts by their very nature were sites of a very non-democratic form of governing —. It's that Henry's court was one of the first to implement a series of administrative reforms that created a state of censorship, mass terror (at least in the circles of court), and utter lack of advisory free-speech that had normally been allowed to friends and advisers of the King:
Firstly, several amendments by an important early adviser of Henry, Thomas Cromwell, brought about a change that moved administrative procedures from their semi-medieval style, into a bureaucratic modernity. Secondly, however, was the development of the Acts of Supremacy and the Treason Act of 1534, both of which established Henry as an uncriticizable figure, whereby "all honours, dignities, preeminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity” were owed to Henry. Henry's dictatorial alignment of heresy and treason as he ascended to the highest position in the newly-formed Church of England similarly established him as a tyrannical source of control, just as his acts established a Tudor equivalent to the culture of censorship and investigation in Soviet Russia.

[Crowson;485611]Weeelll, I like Wyatt. He can be read as an imagist poet, and I like your reading of the early Tudor Court, although I'd challenge too - are you sure that this was the first court to be dictatorial and dogmatic? How about the whole tradition of 'court'? And feudal life wasn't exactly porous and open.

i like Wyatt because he uses dynamic ideas and images, I think. His poems move, perhaps, become located in both the personal and metaphoric. But this is also an 'easy' reading, rooted in a history which assumes that English poetry moved from aural/trope to blurred personal to metaphor.

I should be working. Back tomorrow.

Sarah-Jane[/quote]

Cam, that's one fair reading, but also think about the narrative which your comment is located within, plus all the assumptions and hierarchies your explanation privileges.

Do you think you might be explicating a position by propping up the power-structures of that position as a kind of received wisdom?

The history of ground rents might be interesting, if you want to explore a more everyday (less detached-political) approach to understanding how feudal societies might be as complex and dogmatic as renaissance ones - it's just that (perhaps) our society privileges the renaissance because that's our easy urban trope.

Sarah

Sarah, but would those other narratives — are you talking about those situated out of the court? — be appropriate to Wyatt?

I think I'm probably trying to argue against situating poets/poetic work in the context of 'The Ladybird Book of Historical Facts'.

Cam, you've studied sociology. What is 'court', but a fictionalised system of power-structures we privilege to prop up our received (imo flawed) wisdoms that prop up our contemporary 'truths'.

But also, I'd say, know and don't be too resistant to whatever reading your institution is pushing at you. We all need to survive, and we can only be resistant if we're living within the dominant narrative.

Sarah-Jane