Today’s Poem: Whoso List to Hunt

A dangerous woman: “wild for to hold, though I seem tame”

Richard II’s heraldic white deer, c. 1394 (Wikimedia Commons)

The twentieth century loved Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542). Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore, John Berryman: Poets and critics were ecstatic about his work, which seemed to them new and fresh.

Of course, that was because previous centuries had not much cared for Wyatt’s verse: drab, it seemed to them, and a sidetrack that turned away from richer poetry that came before and denser verse that would come after. Wyatt was always mentioned as a key figure in the creation of the English sonnet but not much otherwise noticed.

And so, when he came to be celebrated in the twentieth century, part of the reason was that his verse was little known. These days, after almost a century of being proclaimed an underappreciated master, Wyatt no longer has the frisson of the fresh revelation or even of being underappreciated. When everybody anthologizes the man’s work — “They Flee from Me,” “I Find No Peace,” “The Country Mouse and the Town Mo…