Sir Thomas Wyatt
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Tudor courtier who found a way to write extraordinary and enduring poetry while under the intense scrutiny of Henry VIII's machinery of state.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the greatest poet of his age', Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne. As an ambassador to Henry VIII and, allegedly, too close to Anne Boleyn, he experienced great privilege under intense scrutiny. Some of Wyatt's poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh and conversational and yet he wrote them under the tightest constraints, when a syllable out of place could have condemned him to the Tower.
With
Brian Cummings
50th Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York
Susan Brigden
Retired Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford
And
Laura Ashe
Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Studios Audio Production
Reading list:
Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds.), Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Routledge, 2016)
Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (Faber, 2012)
Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy (Short Books, 2011)
Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Patricia Thomson (ed.), Thomas Wyatt: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1995)
Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Thomas Wyatt (ed. R. A. Rebholz), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1978)
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Guests and related links
Contributors:
-Μύ of the University of Oxford
-ΜύΒ of the University of OxfordΒ
-ΜύΒ of the University of YorkRelated links:
Broadcasts
- Thu 9 May 2024 09:00Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
- Sun 12 May 2024 23:00Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
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