Krantz
Wyatt and Surrey
questions

Poetry of Wyatt and Surrey

C. S. Lewis (Oxford History of English Literature: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century) has claimed that Wyatt and Surrey belong to a period of what he calls "Drab Age Verse." Lewis considers the poetry closer to the medieval verse that followed Chaucer's than to the "golden" or aureate poetry of the Elizabethans. He characterizes Drab poetry as having non-complex rhyme schemes, many refrains, short lines or lines with internal rhymes, plain language with "few metaphors, no stylized syntax, and none of the sensuous imagery loved by the Elizabethans" (222). Nonetheless, he reminds us that the poetry succeeded because most of it was meant to be sung. What is best in it appears in Wyatt and Surrey.

1. Does any of Wyatt's poetry remind you of how Shakespeare (an Elizabethan poet par excellence) has written? Do you perceive in Wyatt's poetry anything that seems to mark him as a renaissance person?

2. Lewis suggests that Wyatt's poems are "full of resentment." (229). Where you see this?

3. At his best, Wyatt has "intensity, and sometimes a dramatic quality which the English lyric had hardly even attempted before" (230).

4. Your text and Lewis both remark on Surrey's technical skill--especially in establishing regular rhythm. Compare Wyatt's "The Long Love" (527) with Surrey's "Love that doth reign." Scan both and mark how regular they are.

5. Explicate the beginning of "So Cruel prison." Remark on its poetic techniques, its dominant imagery, and any feeling it conveys.