SOURCE: Davis, Walter R. “Contexts in Surrey's Poetry.” English Literary Renaissance 4, no. 1 (winter 1974): 40-55.

In the following essay, Davis examines Surrey's “concern for wholeness, for singleness of effect” in his poetry.

In his pioneering essay “The Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Hallett Smith drew attention to Wyatt's superiority over Surrey by comparison of the former's “The longe love that in my thought doeth harbar” and the latter's “Love that doth raine and live within my thought,” both translations of Petrarch's “Amor, che nel penser” (CXL); Wyatt's superiority, he noted, lay in the greater clarity of his imagery and the forcefulness of his syntax.¹ More recently, Maurice Evans has rephrased the contrast in order to emphasize both sides of the coin: “Surrey's sonnet is both less precise in wording and less faithful in content, but at the same time more fluid in movement,” or, in other words, while Wyatt...