SOURCE: Tromly, Frederic B. “Surrey's Fidelity to Wyatt in ‘Wyatt Resteth Here.’” Studies in Philology 77, no. 4 (fall 1980): 376-87.

In the following essay, Tromly discusses the importance of Surrey's elegy to Wyatt in understanding Surrey's body of work.

Surrey's hour seems to have come round (again) at last. In recent years a number of studies have rehabilitated his reputation by removing him from Wyatt's steadily lengthening shadow.¹ By dissociating the two poets, Surrey's admirers have made it difficult to continue to regard, or rather disregard, him as merely an incompetent Wyatt. Their insistence on Surrey's separate identity has allowed attention to be focussed on his characteristic strengths: mastery of rhetoric and form, elegant diction, and rich allusiveness. Unfortunately, this desire to dissociate the two poets has inclined Surrey's champions to underestimate the significance of the closest point of literary contact between them, his epitaph “Wyatt Resteth Here.” Though critics...