SOURCE: Jones, Emrys. Introduction to Henry Howard Earl of Surrey: Poems, edited by Emrys Jones, pp. xi-xxv. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

In the following essay, Jones provides an overview of Surrey's career as an innovative poet.

In his History of English Poetry (1781) Thomas Warton pronounced Surrey ‘the first English classical poet’. For him the observation did not need justifying, it was self-evidently true; but today it may perplex. Literary history is attended with many difficulties: it is rarely possible to say of a writer that he is doing something quite new and that he is ushering in a new school. The sixteenth century presents a confused scene—especially to the historian eager to distinguish ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ elements in literary compositions. We are accustomed to regarding the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the age of neo-classicism; the term is not usually extended to the sixteenth. Nevertheless, the poetry...