The poem of poems, for me, is one of Sappho’s, the one beginning, in the version by William Carlos Williams, “That man is a peer of the gods.” Where has the paradoxically powerful and eloquent articulation of weakness and voicelessness been more acutely embodied? But the paradigmatic lyric poem in English, I’m certain, must be “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”—a different kind of poem altogether, one of taciturnity rather than voicelessness, bitterness rather than weakness, and above all one that is concrete about things that are observable—visible, tactile, audible: “When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, / And she me caught me in her arms long and small”—rather than subjective or proprioceptive, like Sappho’s “a delicate fire runs in / my limbs, my eyes / are blinded and my ears / thunder.” It’s no surprise to realize that the survival of Sappho’s poem—or rather, the fragment of it we have—is a matter of luck; while some of her works have been found on ancient papyri, this one was quoted by the pseudo-Longinus in On the Sublime. You’d think that a sixteenth-century English poem would be a little more likely to reach us, but Peter Murphy, in his book on Thomas Wyatt’s most famous poem and its afterlife, reminds us that its survival, too, “is wonderful, even astonishing.” It was written in a book that Wyatt kept in his possession, and not published until after his death; during his lifetime it probably circulated among his milieu, “the busy and deadly world of Henry [VIII]’s court,” as Murphy says. But Murphy’s is a book whose text teaches you to see its title as possibly misleading—to ask what is meant by “public” and “private.” Consider that although the poem was written in a book belonging to Wyatt, it is not in his handwriting; it was written down by his secretary in a style that, according to Murphy, “was the basic script of public life of this period, used for letters, memos, and some sorts of important documents,” signaling “that the words and the text were being entered on a public stage.” Public and private were different things in the 1530s than they are today. And while “They flee from me” feels very personal, it is not addressed to the woman who is its subject, and who is at first not "you" or "she" but “they”—as in, I’m not naming any names, but you know who you I’m talking about, though I could appreciate a twenty-first century détourned reading in which the subject is of indeterminate gender. Only eventually does she become “she.” The poem is addressed to a third party or parties who are asked to adjudicate: “But since that I so kindly am served / I would fain know what she hath deserved.” It relates to a literary convention—I am surprised Murphy does not mention this—that was also a social pastime, the demande d’amour, a “love question” proposed for debate. But here, the only answer to the poem’s question is a resonant silence. The poem “was designed from the start to be filled in.” That filling in has happened more and more over the centuries, and above all—to skip from Murphy’s opening pages to its final chapter—in the era of the so-called “new criticism” of the middle of the last century, which (under the guise of a sort of formalism) prescribed certain ways of living one’s emotional life as laudably “mature” and “ironic,” and when it turned out that “Wyatt—as a name for the speaker of the poem—is the kind of person Brooks and Warren” (authors of the once ubiquitous Understanding Poetry) “celebrate…Bitter, maybe, but with a complex bitterness, and that complexity is the important thing.” Murphy is rightly ironical about Brooks and Warren’s idea of irony. We may be done with Brooks and Warren, and even with maturity, but we’re not quite over irony, and the same goes for bitterness and complexity, though the specifically masculine versions of those qualities embodied in Wyatt’s poem, or in the ways it’s been read so far, look tattered. But Wyatt’s question remains open, and it can still be answered differently.
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Peter Murphy, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt, is published by Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2019.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.