Contributions
A Kentish gentleman, son of a loyal Tudor servant, Thomas Wyatt grew up at Allington Castle and entered Henry VIII's service young, as courtier and diplomat. His embassies to Italy, France and the court of Charles V brought him into direct contact with the poetry of the continental Renaissance. From it he brought back a revolution: he was the first to naturalise the Petrarchan sonnet in English, translating and adapting it, and to introduce into the language the form, phrasing and amorous play of Italian lyric. He also wrote songs, epigrams, satires and a paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms. Nothing appeared in his lifetime: his poems circulated in manuscript at court, then were printed fifteen years after his death in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), alongside Surrey's. That posthumous anthology made Wyatt one of the founding fathers of modern English lyric poetry.
Significance
Wyatt is the ferryman who carried English into Renaissance poetry. Before him the English line remained medieval; after him the sonnet, the Petrarchan love song and a personal, tormented voice became possible. His finest poems — intensely introspective, marked by amorous betrayal and the instability of royal favour — keep a striking modernity. But his life was lived on the razor's edge of the most dangerous court in Europe. Closely associated with Anne Boleyn before her royal marriage — some have supposed, without proof, an affair — Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1536 at the queen's fall, and is said by tradition to have watched the executions from his window. Freed, arrested again for treason in 1541, pardoned again, he owed his survival to his skill and to powerful protectors. In him the lover's complaint and the courtier's dread are one: poetry is the outlet of a man who knows that a prince's favour can kill.
Influence
He opened the way for all Elizabethan lyric by importing the sonnet and the Petrarchan manner; Surrey, his junior, carried the work on, and Tottel's Miscellany spread their verse to the generation of Sidney and Shakespeare. Wyatt lastingly settled the love-complaint and the introspective voice into English poetry. He himself drew directly on Petrarch, whom he translated and imitated, and on the Italian and French court poetry discovered on embassy; courtly song, the classical epigram and the Psalms fed his other registers, and Henry VIII's court supplied the matter of his dread.
Anecdote
In the spring of 1536, when Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery and treason, Wyatt — made suspect by his past closeness to the queen — was thrown into the Tower of London. From his window, tradition holds, he saw the heads fall of the men charged with her, then the queen's own. From it he drew a harrowing poem, headed by the Latin motto "circumdederunt me inimici mei" ("my enemies have encircled me"), in which he writes that the Bell Tower "showed me such a sight / That in my head sticks day and night." He escaped the scaffold, but learned in his flesh what it cost to have come too near the royal sun.