Sir Thomas Wyatt, the contemporary and friend of the gallant Earl of Surrey was born at Allington Castle, on the River Medway, in 1503. Wyatt made an early appearance at Court at the christening of Princess Mary in 1516. Soon afterwards he proceeded to St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1520, he married Elizabeth, the daughter of Lord Cobham. They had a son, also called Thomas, and a daughter, Bess. Later she proved unfaithful and Wyatt refused to live with her.
Wyatt is granted as not only a historic importance, but also an individual poetic achievement. He is the poet who first brought Petrarchanism to England and with it the Italian verse-forms of the sonnet, the ottava rima and the terzarima. He is also a poet who is inspired by his own profound awareness of unhappy love, which he seeks to express in vivid and dramatic images and language.
He was practically the first of the modern English poets. Although he was versed in the methods of Petrarch’s art and was familiar with laws of the French and Italian schools, Wyatt was by no means so exact a verse maker as other poets of his age. Many of Wyatt’s works were translation of the Italian Petrarch and others. His works includes sonnets, songs, letters, ballads, epigrams, conzoni etc…
The poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt were not available to English readers at large until fifteen years after his death, when they appeared in the famous Songes and Sonettes, written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward, Late Earle of Surrey, and other.This volume, published by Richard Tottel in 1557, is now called Tottel’s Miscellany, and is rightly described as the fountain-head of Elizabethan lyric verse.
