ABSTRACT

Mankind's primitive desire for a story probably accounts for the fact that the recorded poetry of early periods usually takes some form of narrative. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503, and died at the age of thirty-nine. His poems were not printed until 1557, when they appeared with the work of other authors in Tottel's Miscellany, the publication of which was to be a landmark for ever in the progression of English poetry. 'Awake my Lute' is Wyatt's best poem, but nearly almost all his lyrics, of which love is the constant theme, have touches of the same quality. Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, born some ten years later than George Gascoigne, is a poet who has been enthusiastically praised by many of the best critics. It is true that his Induction has a musical solemnity of movement that no one else in his time could match, and that alone is enough to warrant eulogy.