SOURCE: Fowler, Alastair. “Surrey's Formal Style.” In Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems, pp. 21-37. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Fowler studies formal structure in Surrey's poetry as a way of discovering possible indirect meanings in his verse.

Most critics find the temperate region confusing and prefer to operate either in the hot zone of poetry as communication (saying) or the cool zone of poetry as artefact (making). The recently dominant schools of Formalist criticism appear to have gone in the latter direction. But appearances are a little deceptive. The New Critics, it is true, left the author and his original audience so much out of account that they came to treat the work as a fairly simple machine, whose mechanism could be understood without reference to working procedures or conventions other than our own. Paradoxically, however, the Yale critics rebuilt the machine...