Sixteenth-century english poetry

During the Renaissance, especially due to the tremendous influence of Italian lyrical poetry (Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso), widely known either through translation or adaptations, significant achievements marked the revival and rapid development of English poetry. Thematically, sixteenth-century English (lyrical and epic) poems revealed a growing interest in court culture, in general, and in the relationship between European cultural values and artistic models and the products of the emergent national cultures, in particular. The wide 'umbrella' of court culture-related themes included:

- the relationships between humanism, chivalric values and court culture, with particular stress on courtly and platonic love;

- the way in which the arts were used by rulers to project images and political messages about themselves, their courts, and the destiny of their countries and kingdoms;

- the role of women in court culture, both women as ornaments of the court and women as rulers. (Griffiths, 1998)

In addition, drawing on the vernacular models of Italian Renaissance poetry (especially on Petrarch), imitating or criticising them, the most important of the English Renaissance poets - Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare - imposed on themselves "an explicit mission to regenerate English as a literary language, to blazon English poetry forth as worthy of comparison with the best of Italy and the best of Greece and Rome" (Griffiths, 1998), and shaped up their works according to their Protestant convictions and to their opinions regarding the position and the function of the poet at court.

LYRICAL POETRY

"The state of English poetry before the new styles were imported from Italy is vividly exemplified by the verse of that lively, caustic, and often bawdy cleric John Skelton (c. 1460-1529). Highly regarded in his day as poet and scholar, and a laureate of both Oxford and Cambridge universities, he was singled out for praise by Caxton and Erasmus as a leading luminary of the English literary scene. Yet within a few decades his reputation went into eclipse. His rugged verse held little appeal for the more polished age of the sonneteers " (Roston, 1982: 34)

The new generation of English poets turned for inspiration to the literature of another European cultural space where the Renaissance had been flourishing, namely Italy. That may be (at least partly) accounted for by the fact that "in poetry, neither Greek, nor Latin verse could serve as metrical models (although they did for subject-matter and genre), since they depended upon a quantitative, non-accentual metre unsuited to English as a non-inflected language. Even the incorporation of continental verse-forms into English required considerable ingenuity on the part of the poet, particularly as the language was still fluid." (Roston, 1982: 44) In this context, translations and adaptations played a very important part in making the humanistic literature of Italy widely known and it was in particular owing to writers like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, that the acculturation of one of the most popular forms of lyrical poetry, i.e. the sonnet, was possible, thus allowing for the development of a new tradition in poetry writing in Renaissance England.

The publication from 1530 on of several lyrical poetry collections, the most influential of which was Songs and Sonnets or Tottel's Miscellany (1557), moulded the tastes of the readers during the century and confirmed, by the variety of metrical and stanzaic forms cultivated, that the continental Renaissance had entered the poetry of England. (See Roston, 1982: 48-9)

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Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

Life: "Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) was a man of many parts even beyond his distinction as a poet. He was the all-round achiever, excelling in the manifold arts appropriate for the Renaissance courtier. A skilled athlete and swordsman, handsome in appearance, an accomplished linguist and scholar, a knowledgeable astronomer and musician, he was also held in high regard as a diplomat, both by his own King and by Emperor Charles V." (Roston, 1982: 40-1) He lived a short, but eventful life among the aristocrats of Henry VIII's court, getting often involved in dangerous political relationships

Berdan, John M. (1920) Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1547, New York: Macmillan, available from http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7030529M/Early_Tudor_poetry_1485-1547.

Gavriliu, Eugenia (2000) Lectures in English Literature. From Anglo-Saxon to Elizabethan, Galati: Galati University Press.

Griffiths, Matthew (1998) English Court Poets and Petrarchism: Wyatt, Sidney and Spenser, available from http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/submissions/Griffiths.html.

Jokinen, Anniina (2007) "Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)". in Luminarium. Anthology of English Literature, available from http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sidbio.htm.

Jokinen, Anniina (2010) "The Life of Sir Thomas Wyatt." in Luminarium. Anthology of English Literature, available from http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wyattbio.htm.

Minto, William (2011 [1885]) Characteristics of English Poets, 2nd edition, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons. In Sonnet Central, available from http://www.sonnets.org/minto.htm.

Roston, Murray (1982) Sixteenth-Century English Literature, London: Macmillan Education Limited.

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