The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt

Abstract

This fascinating, hopeful book delivers much more than its title promises. Its focus is the “object-life” of a single Henrician court poem (3), Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me,” from its first known appearance in manuscript to its publication in the epoch-making Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) to its antiquarian reprinting and editing in middle modernity, its uptake among the New Critics and New Historicists of the twentieth century, and its current place as an anthology piece and mainstay in the English literature classroom. The methodological experiment alone—with the play of scale between three stanzas of rhyme royal and five hundred years of literary history, between one reluctant author and myriad readers, commentators, collectors, scholars, and educators—is worth the price of admission. But this book could not have been written using just any poem. As Murphy reminds us, “They Flee from Me” is about the persistence of a changeful past—the bitter, necessary task of preservation against “the deep entropic forces at work in the heart of the universe and in our lives” (143).Wyatt’s poem records a few small events: a spurned courtier, a borrowed idiom, an erotic encounter resounding in memory. “Why did it not vanish into time?” Murphy asks (37). This earnest, uncluttered central question leads him through the miniature worlds of Tudor poetics, book history, editorial theory, and canon formation in a spirit of wonder, free from the dogma and tedium that can accompany fine-grained specialist scholarship. The book’s main agenda is curiosity, and small details almost always yield to big thinking. A smudged fingerprint on “They Flee from Me” in the Devonshire Manuscript of the 1530s prompts a meditation on Wyatt’s primally individuated style—a signature roughness that, we learn, was smoothed over by a succession of literary agents from Mary Howard (the first owner of the manuscript) and the publisher Richard Tottel to critics of Wyatt’s verse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An unresolved crux in an eighteenth-century edition elicits a strong defense of the literary scholar’s obligation to historical fact against the temptation in textual criticism to honor and even amplify uncertainties. “Not trying to distinguish right from wrong,” Murphy argues, “refuses to acknowledge the basic spirit behind the making of books, the creation of poems,” and indeed behind Wyatt’s poem, which attempts in its way to “make sense out of chaos . . . to know ourselves and the world” (88).Elsewhere Murphy investigates the major works of English literary history that served as way stations for “They Flee from Me” in its transit to modernity. A reading of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), where the poem was first anthologized, reveals a formative conflict between the earliest literary historians, for whom “a glorious imperial present . . . demonstrates the barbarity of the past,” and the antiquarian philologists “paging through the dirty and damaged manuscript,” for whom “the present is also corrupted, eaten away by the fire of time, and hence in need of correction” (104). Murphy shows how the first Oxford Book of English Verse (1901) and I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) framed “They Flee from Me” for an era of mass education as literature assumed the mantle of breeding and cultivation and short-form lyric—under the constraints of the academic schedule—became paradigmatic in teaching. By the time Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren featured “They Flee from Me” in their widely adopted textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), the poem functioned as a call for American readers of Wyatt “to participate in a kind of elite: an elite characterized by a tough-minded, unsentimental, held-off attitude toward a difficult world” (192), something that Wyatt himself would have understood.Much of the charisma of The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem comes from its tacit rejection of the form of the academic monograph: the book is organized not in chapters but in parts, each consisting of bite-size sections; in place of notes it has a short, conversational essay on references; and its many images have no captions. Relatedly, the book joins a wave of similar experiments that reject the default professional mode of synchronic contextualism by restricting the scope of analysis not to a narrow slice of time but to a single poem, book, or relationship, which is then allowed to unfold across several centuries.1 Murphy’s book stands out even among its most impressive competitors because it reads as wholly intentional and forthright, as if it developed from a joyous conviction, absent any academic pressures. Indeed, Murphy’s welcoming style could easily connect with a broad general public (and in this sense the series editor does the book a mild disservice where, in a foreword, he compares the excitement of its subject matter to “the anticipation of enjoying of an aged wine” [x]).Inevitably, Murphy’s book will not please everyone. The short sections with suggestive but sometimes cryptic titles do not always do justice to the material they contain. From time to time Murphy’s unassuming prose can drift into a rhythm oddly reminiscent of a children’s book (“John Harington’s diary records daily life’s variety of events. Much of it is business, and potentially very interesting business. He records who said what on given days in Parliament, and some of those days were important days” [63] and so on). The book is less insightful than usual where Murphy seems to have an ax to grind, as in the second half of the final part, on Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism. Specialists will find errors. Murphy’s claim that in the seventeenth century “no truly public libraries existed, and private and University libraries had no cataloging systems worth mentioning” (74) might, in a lesser book, have rankled me, for example.2 But part of the challenge of this essential new study is to imagine a version of literary scholarship in which granular knowledge of a single period or method is not the primary measure of expertise. Murphy’s bid is that portability and persistence in time—not just of Wyatt’s poem but of a discipline—could matter the most.