SOURCE: Daalder, Joost. “Wyatt and ‘Liberty’.” Essays in Criticism XXIII, No. 1 (January 1973): 63-7.

In the following essay, Daalder examines the numerous appearances of the word “liberty” throughout Wyatt's works and maintains that the word is charged with “a profound emotional significance” for the poet and “indicates a psychological freedom from nervous tension.” A postscript to this essay, published in 1985, is reprinted below under that date.

It is easy, too easy, to think of the word ‘liberty’ in Wyatt's poems as representing merely a state in which the lover is not a ‘thrall’ who is ‘bond’ to a woman he ‘serves’ according to a conventional code of courtly love. The word would thus be no more than an element of a stereotyped phraseology used almost thoughtlessly. In fact, however, ‘liberty’ is in a number of instances a word charged with what must to Wyatt have seemed a profound emotional...