Question- Thomas Wyatt as a sonneter of Elizabethan age.

Or
Thomas Wyatt as a love poet of Elizabethan age.
Or
What are the poetic features and writing style of Wyatt poetry in English literature?

Answer -

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) was 16th century English politician, ambassador, and lyric poet credited with introducing the sonnet to English literature. He was born at Allington lastle near maidstone in Kent though the family was originally from Yorkshire. His mother was Anne skinner and his father Henry, who had earlier been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, had been a privy councillor of Henry VII and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509. Thomas followed his father to court after his education at St. John's college, Cambridge Entering the King's service, In public life his principal patron was Thomas Eromwell after whose death he was recalled from abroad and imprisoned (1541). His poems were circulated at court and may have been published anonymously in the anthology. The court of venus (earliest edition e. 1537) during his lifetime, but were not published under his name until after his death. The first major book to feature and attribute his verse was tottel's miscellany (1557), printed 15 years after his death.

In 1520 Wyatt married Elizabeth Brooke (1503-1560). A year later, they had a son Thomas (1521-1554) who led Wyatt's rebellion many years his father's death. In 1524, Henry VIII assigned Wyatt to be an ambassador at home and abroad, and he separated from his wife soon after on grounds of adultery.

As many of Wyatt's works were translations of the Italian poet Petrarch and others. The "Egerton manuscript" is an album containing wyatt's personal selection of his poems and translations which preserves 123 texts, partly in his handwriting. "Tottel's miscellany" (1557) is the Elizabeth anthology which created Wyatt's posthumous reputation. It ascribes 96 poems to him, 33 not in the Egerton manuscript. These 156 poems can be ascribed to Wyatt with certainty on the basis of objective basis. Another 129 poems have been ascribed to him purely on the basis of subjective editorial judgement. Rebholz comments in his preface to Sir Thomas Wyatt, "The complete poems" "The problem of determining which poems Wyatt wrote is as yet unsolved". Totottel is miscellany, the first printed anthology of English poetry. The editors of publisher Richard Tottel chose to manipulate the rhyme and punctuation of Wyatt's work. The full title of text, songs and sonettes written by the Ryght honorable Lord Henry Howard, Late Earle of Surrey and other shows that Wyatts work was not regarded as highly as Howard's at this time. The Wyatt poem "The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbour" is a translation of Petrarch's Rime 140.

Wyatt experimented in stanza forms including the rondeau, Epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima songs and satires, as well as with monorime, triplets with refrains quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with codas and the French forms of douraine and treizaine. He introduced the poulter's measure from rhyming couplets composed of a 12- syllable cambic line (Alexandrine) followed by a 14-syllable iambic line (fourteener) and he is considered a master of the iambic tetrameter.

Wyatt's poetry reflects classical and Italian models, but he also admired the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, and his vocabulary reflects that of Chaucer, he uses Chaucer's word newfangleness, meaning fickleness, in "They Flee From Me" many of his poems deal with trials of romantic love and the devotion of the suitor to an unavailable or cruel mistress.

Eighteen century critic Thomas Warton considered Wyatt "confessedly an inferior" to his contemporary Henry Howard and felt that wyatt's "genius was the moral and diclactic species" but deemed him "The first polished English satirist". The 20th Century saw an awakening in his popularity and surge in critical attention. C. S. Lewis called him "the father of the Drab Age" from what he calls the "golden" age of the 16th century. Patricia Thomson describes Wyatt as "The Father of English Poetry".

Many have conjectured that Wyatt fell in love with Anne Boleyn in the early to mid-1520s.

Henry Howard, Earl of surrey, also penned a translation of the Petrarch poem, which he called "Love that Doth Rugh and Live Within My Thought". Wyatt uses the tradition and respect held by Petrarch's work to scaffold the new form of English poetry and to catalogue the political and social tensions of his time.

A part from the issue of originality, Wyatt's work is difficult to attribute as he used various forms within poetry, prose and verse. His canon includes sonnets, epigrams, rondeaux psalms, letters, songs, ballads, canone and satires. Writing in a range of styles, which explore the forms of literature across the ages and nations, understandably makes the provenance sometimes difficult to establish.

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