Eighteen poems are all that can on reasonable grounds be attributed to Thomas, Lord Vaux. No poems are ascribed to him in extant documents before his death; scholars depend on the assignment of thirteen poems to him in the Elizabethan anthology The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) and on five more attributions found elsewhere. Vaux's is, therefore, an uncertain canon; yet if one allows that most of the attributions are reliable, he can stand as the most important of those whom literary history terms "minor courtly makers," contemporaries of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose production and reputations fall short of theirs but whose verse emerged from the same social milieu and was to a degree enabled by their poetic innovations. It may be assumed that Vaux wrote more than has been preserved, and it is known from later allusions and imitations that his work...