Wyatt is considered the first of the great Elizabethan poets. His experiments with new formats, especially regarding meter and measure, were very influential in inspiring the great English poets who followed later in the sixteenth century, such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and, of course, William Shakespeare. Wyatt did not publish his poems, but he did circulate them within the Tudor court, where they were read and enjoyed. As a reflection of Wyatt's importance in the English literary canon, several new editions of his poetry were published in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, offering important insight into his work. Among the best are Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, edited by Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (1969); Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems, edited by Joost Daalder (1975); and Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, edited by Ronald A. Rebholz (1981).

In the introduction to his...