The Complete Poems

Stunning editorial and historiographical work by Rebholz, revealing an incredibly prolific Wyatt. What that also unfortunately reveals is his repetitous and inconsistent catalogue. Thomas Wyatt led such a fascinating life and the context imbued into many of the poems gives them a very multifaceted existence; some of them being genuinely impressive as pieces of poetry isolated from the history that makes them even more interesting. A good handful of this work makes for some of the best lyrics in the English language but the caveat is that he wrote a hell of a lot of lyrics - and a lot of them contain repeating themes, repeating structures and even repeating language (he loved the word "hap") to the point where I think a 'Selected Poems' show more may have been better suited to his work, because reading this entire book is exhaustingly tedious on occasion. The "Ballades" and "Songs" segments are mostly dispensible save for a select few, given their blatant similarity to a lot of his higher quality sonnets and epigrams - yet they take up almost half of the entire content of the book. The Epistles and Epigrams and Sonnets and Psalms are all absolutely sublime - "Mine own John Poyntz" and "Me list no more to sing" (the best of the Songs) being two of my favourite poems ever - but it is hard to not see them as overshadowed by the onslaught of other mediocre poems. I still of course love Wyatt and think he was a brilliant poet when he wanted to be, but Rebholz' work on this collection is almost too good. On coming back to this I will definitely be skipping over the largely superfluous parts, which is a shame given that means skipping hundreds of pages of incredibly conducted research. show less