SOURCE: Hobson, Christopher Z. “Country Mouse and Towny Mouse: Truth in Wyatt.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 39, No. 3 (Fall 1997): 230-58.

In the essay below, Hobson contends that Wyatt employed concealment and evasion in his poetry as necessary means to present difficult truths.

Truth is a crucial term in the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt. The word and its derivatives, with closely related terms like “trust” and “faith,” and their derivatives and opposites, appear in nearly 50 percent of his poems. These terms frequently clump together, three and four to a poem, although it is equally true that there are major poems raising the issue of truth in which none of them appears.¹ Their frequency in Wyatt is an index of the importance of a cluster of ideas: truth in its various senses, particularly the value and power of truth.

Wyatt's “truth” has become a touchstone of competing critical...