Is there
such a thing as Material Literary History? That seems to be what Peter Murphy’s
The Long Public Life of a Short Private
Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt (2019) is, at least partly.
Perhaps a subcategory of the History of the Book. Certainly a history of the
beginnings of English Literature as a subject of study, and a condensed look at
the move from scholarship to criticism in the school subject of English
Literature in the twentieth century.
In part I, “Thomas Wyatt Writes
a Poem and Shows It to Others,” Murphy goes carefully through the poem’s first
physical life in Wyatt’s manuscript book, apparently copied for him there in
Secretary Hand by someone else. He gives a tentative first reading, stanza by
stanza, talking about Rhyme Royal and its history in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, with its
suggestions of a form for love poems where the love has ended badly. He sees the
poem as possibly functioning at court as a recommendation or résumé proving
Wyatt’s chops as a complete Renaissance gentleman.
Murphy
illustrates with Mary Howard’s commonplace book, in which “They Flee from Me”
was written, that poems get away from us and can change. Is the poem copied
into her book with its changes still Wyatt’s poem? “A full description of our
poem,” writes Murphy, would have all its versions and changes.
He makes
clear that at this point in its history, Wyatt’s poem and short lyrics
generally were works of and for the elite, the people at the very top of
England’s class system, and it was a very dangerous place to be in the England
of Henry VIII and his changing whims, determining who was in and out of favor,
in or out of the Tower. This poem, he writes, was written to be overheard, “and
the deep indirection of its reference turns out to only make it easier for
Outsiders to imagine their way into the scene the poem represents: a
paradoxical side effect of its adaptation to the deadly intimacy of its
birthplace.” Wyatt’s special talent was “for performing this group culture with
a fascinating mixture of shared values and idiosyncratic inflection.”
Then
Tottel published the poem in 1557, in his Songes
and Sonettes, which we usually now call Tottel’s
Miscellany and it became “a public commodity.” Tottel apparently had access
to Wyatt’s book, which was then in the possession of John Harington and
remained in his family for two hundred years. Tottel titles the poems and
groups them by authors’ names. Both Mary Howard and Tottel smooth out Wyatt’s
meter, and “kindly” in the penultimate line becomes “gentilly” in Mary and
“unkindly” in Tottel, where “strange fashion” becomes “bitter fashion,”
suggesting that emendations might not only be intended to improve, but to
interpret, the poem. Tottel’s second edition has a “Table” at the end with
first lines of poems and page numbers; the first edition has neither, and is
thus a little closer to the commonplace book idea, where you need to already
know where the poem is. Songs and Sonnets
is a great success, and is mentioned in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, but after a few editions Wyatt’s poem
disappears from public view for a century and a half.
Part II
is “A Century of Learning, and the Invention of Literature.” When the last Harington,
to whom Wyatt’s book had come down in possession, held the book, the history of
English poetry did not yet exist, nor did public libraries or poetry
collections that spanned various periods, nor the concept of such periods. In
the eighteenth century, editors begin to make decisions about texts based on
previous printed copies of the poem. Thus Edmund Curll in his reprint of Tottel
in 1728. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of
English Poetry was published in 1765 and became one of the most popular and
influential books of the century. Percy changed his name from Piercy in 1756
for the most arbitrary of editorial reasons: he liked it better, therefore it
was the “uncorrupted” original. The view of history taken in the dedication to
the Reliques, partly written by
Samuel Johnson, is that history shows how we got here, to this perfection of
manners and morals, esthetics and politics. Now the object is to not to make
Wyatt better, like Mary Howard or Tottel, but to show him with all his
unperfected warts. Scholarship has been fostered, if not invented in his
century. Through a carefully constructed and maintained network of friends and
acquaintances, Percy acquires a 1559 Tottel. He decided to republish Tottel,
and eventually learned that there was a 1557 version, and even, through the
current Harington, about Wyatt’s book. But aside from a cross reference,
“Surrey [that is, Tottel[ Fo 22,” that he wrote next to the poem on the page
with “They Flee from Me”on it, he ignored the obvious original and constructed
his own “ideal” version from Tottel’s editions. But he knew it was no good. The
idea of poetry’s progress toward a perfect present doesn’t work with Surrey and
Wyatt, who already represent a kind of perfection. But his notation in Wyatt’s
book makes the poem a piece of literary history, a text that exists in several
known forms.
Meanwhile
Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry
(1774,88,91), though it has a Percy-like agenda of tracing “the transitions
from barbarism to civility,” is nevertheless the first such narrative literary
history. When Robert Anderson assembled his Works
of the British Poets, the first such anthology to span periods and kinds of
poems, he stole his biographical prefaces from Warton, but had no project or
agenda other than getting some available version of poems into readers’ hands.
The work of Percy, Warton, and Anderson, misguided or flawed as it is, creates
for the first time the idea of a “literature” outside of the writings of Greeks
and Romans.
Part III
is titled “More Learning, the British Library, and the Song of the Professor.” Only
one nineteenth-century edition goes back to Wyatt’s book and gives, for the first
time in print, essentially the poem as Wyatt approved it with his initials next
to the Secretary Hand copy: George Frederick Nott’s edition of Surrey and Wyatt
in 1815-1816. Writing supersedes print. Nott thinks Surrey and Wyatt are
correctors and improvers of poetry and language. He modernizes the spelling and
justifies doing so for the “general reader” who isn’t an antiquary. But he
leaves “themself.” Murphy thinks he
wants (moral) correctness but also the magic of the past. He does add a “she”
in line 13. Nott had Wyatt’s book rebound and put in some engravings. When Nott
died he had it and Mary Howard’s book, having borrowed both of them from their
owners, but all his books were auctioned off. The British Library bought
Wyatt’s book in 1889 and it became Egerton 2711, after being in private hands.
Mary Howard’s book went to the British Library earlier, in the 1840s.
When
Ewald Flügel publishes an edition of Wyatt in Anglia in 1893, he compares the Egerton ms. “They Flee from Me”
with Tottel’s printed version and with Nott’s edition and we have for the first
time the first time the full philological treatment with footnotes giving
variants and using Egerton as the primary text. But he makes a mistake in saying
that the poem is not in the Devonshire ms.; that is, Mary Howard’s book.
In 1913
Agnes Foxwell published The Poems of Sir
Thomas Wiat and, unlike Flügel, showed the variants in the Devonshire ms.
Foxwell uses modern punctuation. For Flügel and Foxwell, the poem is “an
ever-growing number of closely related versions,” and “They Flee from Me” is
the name of this cluster. Foxwell has the more accurate view of the cluster,
but when she calls the poet “Wiat,” she seems to be doing something else, to be
making some nostalgic gesture.
“They
Flee from Me” does not make it into Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861 and many later editions). But it does make it
into Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book
of English Verse (1901 and thus enters English Literature, of which
Quiller-Couch is the first professor. Having been pronounced one of the best
poems, “our poem is poised for a miraculous second life,” writes Murphy.
In part
IV, “Coming to America, and Making It Big,” Murphy spends some time disparaging
the New Critics and specifically Brooks and Warren’s An Approach to Literature, for their aversion to the sentimental
and their use of irony as a touchstone for good vs. bad poetry. They liked
“They Flee from Me,” of course. In terms of cleverness, the New Critics swapped
reading poetry for writing poetry; you could be just as clever writing about a
poem as you might have been writing one.
A new
space for Wyatt’s poem is created by this college industry of professors
sanctioned by Oxford and Yale: a Professorship of English
Literature>professors and students of literature>the books created by the
professors>the classroom where the student reads the poem in the books and
where the professor talks about them. Murphy suggests the work the poem is
doing in this industry in some sense recreates the work it did for Wyatt in being
proof and practice of mastery and a credential for the elite.
People
got tired of the New Criticism, and something new came along. Stephen
Greenblatt, the New Historicist, has to establish his own scholarly ground contra Brooks, so now the poem does not
arise from the individual and his personality, but in “cultural codes” of “male
identity.” The poet is no longer the center, and people are less agents than
they imagine, and yet the New Historicist does seem to be in control of his own
destiny. And we are, thinks Murphy, “in the midst of a Thomas Wyatt uptick.”
The
lyric poem, concludes Murphy from “They Flee from Me,” has introspection as its
primary focus, and is a “technology of self-expression” with “shared
vocabularies of interior life.” Many read the poem and some of them speculate
about what creatures are “stalking” in line two, but they may like the poem
even without understanding much of it—at least in historical and philological
terms. This attention “does seem to be the only thing people could mean when
they call it his ‘finest poem’.” The poem “was designed, from the start, to be
filled in by the interested, imagining reader, which makes the later reader and
the initial audience curiously similar.” Its order defies the entropy and chaos
it describes taking place, and we like it for that. And “literacy is a claim
against disorder and dissolution, and we need that claim.”
