SOURCE: Southall, Raymond. “‘Love, Fortune and my mind’: the Stoicism of Wyatt.” Essays in Criticism XXXIX, No. 1 (January 1989): 18-28.

In the essay which follows, Southall explores how the precarious life at court influenced Wyatt's poetry.

Writing in these pages nearly twenty-five years ago, I argued against D. W. Harding's suggestion that Wyatt's poetry was an unconscious reflexion of his insecurity as courtier and diplomat and Patricia Thomson's opinion that it was arrogant and cynical.¹ Both of these views, it seemed to me, were likely to detract from the achievement of someone who was ‘coming to be seen as the most important figure in English poetry from the death of Chaucer to the reign of Elizabeth’.² It was not difficult to demonstrate that Wyatt deliberately, not unconsciously, translated public into private experience (guided to some extent, I suggested, by Plutarch) and that far from being arrogant and cynical he...