SOURCE: Watkins, John. “‘Wrastling for this world’: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer.” In Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, edited by Theresa M. Krier, pp. 21-39. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

In the essay below, Watkins investigates the many levels on which Wyatt's works engaged Chaucer's.

For more than four hundred years, critics have honored Wyatt as the first representative of an English Renaissance conceived as an absolute break with the Middle Ages. Surrey eulogized him as the “hand … / That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit,” and Puttenham later canonized him with Surrey as one of the “two chieftains” of a new poetic generation that “greatly pollished our rude & homely maner of vulgar Poesie from that it had been before.”¹ Twentieth-century American critics have taken up this once nationalistically driven championship of Wyatt's originality. Thomas Greene hails him as the first English poet to respond fully...