SOURCE: Hinely, Jan Lawson. “‘Freedom through Bondage’: Wyatt's Appropriation of the Penitential Psalms of David.” In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White, pp. 148-65. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

In the excerpt below, Hinely places Wyatt's psalms at the center of the canon of his works and explores their thematic relation to his secular lyrics.

Critics in general, perhaps discouraged by Tillyard's comment that they are “academic exercises, penitential not merely in matter but to those whose task it is to read them,”¹ have not been noticeably drawn to Wyatt's versions of the Penitential Psalms of David. With the exception of Stephen Greenblatt's chapter in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, little effort has been made to consider the psalms as an integral part of Wyatt's work.² This overlooking or isolating of the...