SOURCE: Lewis, C. S. “Drab Age Verse.” In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, pp. 222-71. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.

In the following excerpt, Lewis explores the nature of the relationship between Surrey and Wyatt.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,¹ was in his twenties when Wyatt died and there is no doubt that he greatly admired Wyatt both as a poet and as a man. But the relation between them was not exactly that of master and pupil. Surrey saw Wyatt as one who had ‘dayly’ produced some famous work ‘to turne to Britains gayn’ and ‘taught what might be sayd in ryme’. Though they come in a poetical elegy (where a man was not expected to be precisely critical) these words, as it happens, define pretty well what Wyatt meant to Surrey. He was not so much the technical master as the man who had suggested...