Sir Thomas Wyatt and the progress of Mannerism in Renaissance English lyric.

Abstract

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry reads less easily than most, and we must either dismiss it or explain it. The fact that few literary critics have dismissed Wyatt testifies to his success as a poet. Yet well into the twentieth-century readers believe Wyatt's poetry ill-wrought and only accidentally successful. In order to underst and Wyatt's poetry and its influence on his successors in Engl and we must underst and the aesthetic premises on which both rely. In 1527 Wyatt encountered Mannerist art in Italy and translated the techniques of Mannerist painting into poetic techniques: he developed a Mannerist poetic line and within poems challenged space, confounded order and harmony much as Italian Mannerist painters do in the 1520s and 1530s. This dissertation speculates about Wyatt's contact with Mannerism during his Italian tour, explores the analogies between Mannerist aesthetic strategy and Wyatt's poetic strategy, describes in detail the development of Wyatt's Mannerist technique and explains Wyatt's influence on sixteenth-century poets, both in the progress of Mannerist poetic style in Engl and , and in the resistance that style provoked. The dissertation concentrates primarily on the sonnet form. It delineates Wyatt's influence on the pentameter line in sixteenth-century poetry and his influence in the development of various sonnet and other verse forms. It also, for the first time, discusses relations between Italian visual arts and English poetry in the Early Tudor Period.