The History of a Lyric Poem

            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.”