SOURCE: Greenblatt, Stephen. “Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt's Poetry.” In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, pp. 115-56. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Greenblatt analyzes the “intimate relationship between Wyatt's poetry and the forces that shape his identity,” notably politics, religion, and sexuality.

There is no translation that is not at the same time an interpretation. This conviction, stamped indelibly in the mind by the fact that men went to the stake in the early sixteenth century over the rendering of certain Greek and Latin words into English, lies at the heart of virtually all of Wyatt's translations, never more so than in his version of the penitential psalms—the traditional grouping of psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143—that were, in the climate of the 1530s and '40s, essentially and unavoidably controversial.¹ Rejecting the relatively mild formulations of his major contemporary sources, Wyatt captures...