Conclusion

Summary

This study breaks off – with, as we shall see shortly, one exception – in 1528. Much critical attention, of a high order, has homed in on the 1530s, and Puttenham's “new company of courtly makers,” who, chiefly in the persons of Wyatt and Surrey, “pollished our rude and homely maner of vulgar Poesie.” The immediate causes of this distinctiveness have not been far to seek. Greg Walker sees in the 1530s generation in England a voice “created out of the intense political pressure of Henrician tyranny,” a tyranny that even in the 1520s had seemed scarcely imaginable. The result is a poetry that suggests “a wider instability in the very categories of knowledge prompted by the unfixing of the realm” and “a fluidity of sexual relationships” that bespeaks a “moral and political amnesia” at its heart. Robert Meyer-Lee finds in Wyatt's poetry an intersection between Lydgate's “laureate poetics” and the verse of fin amor which “had served the elite as a demonstration of their facility with language and their deep capacity for refined sentiment.” Yet the poetic traditions of England and Scotland – traditions that cannot be considered apart from the shaping significance of the European versions of dit and love-allegory – had long been inflected with amour courtois by the time Wyatt reached them, and the love-lyric, as Boffey shows, had moved some way from its elite pretensions.