ABSTRACT
Writers of histories of English literature and kindred works are obliged to take notice of Sir Thomas Wyatt. In the history of English poetry and of English prosody he must be assigned his very important place as a reformer and an adventurer. Students must learn about the anarchy into which rhythms and metres had fallen, and how first Wyatt and then Surrey, learning mainly from Italian and a little from French, took firm hold on the broken rhythms of the fifteenth century and sternly and rather laboriously imposed order. Wyatt's sonnets must be held up for view, because the strict and rigid form of the sonnet helped, as it has been said, almost automatically to produce order; and his rondeaus come in for a share of the same sort of attention. And Wyatt's work as a reformer of English verse is so interesting to watch in progress as well as so great in scope and so fruitful in result that no wonder what Mr. Tillyard calls his ‘text-book glory’ has diverted attention from his work as poet. In Mr. Tillyard's own book of Wyatt … it is the poetry that comes first. Says Mr. Tillyard:—
