ABSTRACT
It has long been noted that Thomas Wyatt’s poetry demonstrates a preoccupation with the self. His verse is punctuated with insistent firstperson pronouns; and, even in his adaptations of Petrarch’s verse, Wyatt repeatedly transforms an address to a third person into a poem about the self. The result is that his poetry appears to be confessional, leading many scholars to interpret his verse biographically. It has become something of a critical tradition, for example, to argue that Wyatt’s sonnet ‘The pillar perisht’ (a translation of Petrarch’s Rima 269) expresses his sorrow concerning the fall and execution of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Recently, however, a number of critics have argued that his poems, whilst hinting at biographical readings, ‘also prove resistant to them, eluding readers who try and pin them down to historical event, place, or person’.2 Such criticism emphasizes that the expression of loss in ‘The pillar perisht’ is generically conventional, fitting equally well under Richard Tottel’s heading for the poem, ‘The louer lamentes the loss of his loue’.3 Moreover, as Cathy Shrank observes, the commemorative function of Petrarch’s opening line, ‘Rotta è l’alta colonna e ‘l verde lauro’ (‘Broken are the high Column and the green Laurel’), which records the names of his patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna,
and beloved muse, Laura, – both of whom died in the plague that swept across Italy – has no equivalent in Wyatt’s poem.4
