Thomas Wyatt (poet) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Elias Sehwartz

Critical Essay by Elias Sehwartz

SOURCE: "The Meter of Some Poems of Wyatt," in Studies in Philology Vol. LX, No. 2, April, 1963, pp. 155-65.

In the following essay, Wyatt's metrics are defended.

In his pioneer essay on "The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line,"¹ C. S. Lewis demonstrated that much fifteenth-century verse, long thought to be defective iambic pentameter, is really a species of native accentual verse, descended from Beowulf and surviving most obviously in the alliterative verse of the Fourteenth Century. Although he did not specify or analyze any poems, Lewis suggested that Wyatt occasionally wrote in the native meter. In 1946, D. W. Harding defended Wyatt against the charge of metrical ineptitude by maintaining that he used a metrical convention much looser than that we have become accustomed to in later English verse.² This convention, says Harding, allows the poet to shift from accentual to accentual-syllabic meter at will; once we become aware of this,...
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