SOURCE: Jentoft, C. W. “Surrey's Four ‘Orations’ and the Influence of Rhetoric on Dramatic Effect.” Papers on Language & Literature 9, no. 3 (summer 1973): 250-62.

In the following essay, Jentoft explains the reasons for the neglect of Surrey's poetry by twentieth-century scholars.

The Earl of Surrey's modern critical reputation is a curious one: everyone knows about his poetry, but few have read it seriously, and fewer yet have read it approvingly. Its place in the development of English prosody requires a few paragraphs in any Renaissance survey, but its individual merits either go unnoticed or serve as foils to the very different virtues of poems considered more worthwhile. Its exclusion from serious consideration in the twentieth century has its origins in the rediscovery of the metaphysical poets by Grierson and Eliot and the related reassessment of Wyatt by Tillyard.¹ Unfortunately, the indirect effect of these studies, and others that followed, has...