SOURCE: "Wyatt's 'Owen Thing,'" in The Critical Review, No. 20, 1978, pp. 42-54.

In the following essay, Wyatt's entire oevre is appraised highly as springing from the poetic centre of a man in the midst of turmoil.

 Fie fro the pres and dwelle with sothefastnesse.
Suffise thine owen thing, thei it be smal.…
(Chaucer) 

Wyatt has by now pretty much consolidated his position as a "great minor poet". The greatness of a few poems, at any rate, is beyond dispute, and since H. A. Mason's account (Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period) there is no longer any excuse for praising him as a graceful court singer (a lesser Surrey) or congratulating him for having introduced the Petrarchan Sonnet into English. Yet for all that, Wyatt has the perhaps good fortune to be more read and talked about than written of. For twentieth-century readers he is very much...