24 The New York Review
vividly describes it, Wyatt’s unruly, in-
dividuated presence, inscribed in the
tiny formal and rhetorical choices he
made, set his poem apart from many
merely proficient poems on similar sub-
jects that circulated at the time.
This distinctiveness also imperiled
it. In Wyatt’s personal copy, the poem
lacks punctuation; it is up to readers of
that version to “assign the performance
part,” as Murphy writes, based on an
interpretation of the poem. Even in
its original form, it cries out for read-
ers’ interventions. When “They Flee
from Me” soon became a standard
in courtly life, others copied it down
in their own commonplace books
and added punctuation wherever it
seemed to fit. Editors changed Wyatt’s
words and regularized his notoriously
“rough” prosody. Before it was a mas-
terpiece, the poem was therefore a
much- remodeled “house for thought,”
according to Murphy. It was a plat-
form for readers’ customizations and
modifications. Every time it was cov-
ered, like a pop song, it was changed.
“ Poetry,” wrote the scholar and poet
Allen Grossman, “pitch[es] persons
toward one another full of news.” In
these smudged forms, the poem lost
part of its occult power to convey that
news across the span of years.
The poem presented other impedi-
ments to longevity. It is, first of all, one
of a kind. Though it uses the fashion-
able meter, popularized by Chaucer,
called rhyme royal, it has no real prede-
cessor in the art. It does not sound much
like Wyatt’s other poems—though his
famous sonnet “Whoso List to Hunt”
(adapted from Petrarch’s Rime 190) is
nearly as good and nearly as anguished.
Wyatt was the John Kerry of his day:
his poetry was, as Murphy points out,
a kind of statecraft, a demonstration of
his worldly prowess. It eschews many
of the conventional scenarios of the
love lyric. Love poems, if Wyatt’s even
counts as one, are primarily useful for
wooing. What keeps them alive is often
their power to entice a person to go to
bed with you, or to keep them in bed
despite their contesting obligations, or
to lure them back into bed once, dis-
tressingly, they’ve moved on. This is a
timeless, highly pragmatic feature of
poetry, and no less true for poems writ-
ten yesterday.
Wyatt’s poem, though, cannot really
be used as a script for courting. He de-
scribes his lover’s charms in the third
person; this is no way to woo some-
body. The poem also cedes all sexual
power to a beloved who is now mysteri-
ously and irretrievably gone. This goes
far beyond the feigned powerlessness
or playing dead of the usual courtier
planning a sneak sexual conquest. The
poem is, instead, about a fluke, some-
thing isolated and bobbing in time, like
a raft in the middle Atlantic. This is
why there’s that math in Wyatt’s poem:
though he is abandoned now, his state
has been “otherwise” twenty times, but
“once in special.” The conventional
arc of a poem so richly invested in its
speaker’s rejection would end in a des-
perate plea for the beloved to return.
For a self-styled courtier of a few de-
cades later, like the hapless Abraham
Slender in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives
of Windsor, the poems in Tottel’s Mis-
cellany were a script: “I had rather than
forty shillings,” Slender exclaims when
Anne Page enters, “I had my Book of
Songs and Sonnets here.” But “They
Flee from Me” is too gnarled and re-
morseful, too strange, too embittered,
to help a lover in a bind.The indirection of “They Flee from
Me,” which may be its most modern
(and modernist) feature, originally
served a tactical purpose. Wyatt’s poem
was a public demonstration that he pos-
sessed not merely verbal power and wit,
but also information and tact. “The fil-
tering of the personal through an in-
herited, continuing culture is the very
essence of lyric poetry,” writes Mur-
phy. The power of Wyatt’s poem arises
not only from its ingenious manipula-
tion of known and finite conventions,
but from its out-of-nowhere portrayal
of unsettling “linguistic and psycho-
logical drama” where members of the
court expected much more reflexive
“repetition and listing,” as in a sing-
along. This is how a poem designed by
a star player in a long-lost, often lethal
cultural game both fulfilled and under-
mined its immediate application in the
world of the Tudor court. His aristo-
cratic circle of readers was tiny: “on the
order of tens,” according to Murphy.
The pronouns “they” and “she” would
have suggested to these readers pos-
sible living antecedents. The poem’s
cunning was a form of self-defense. For
modern readers, these kinds of layers
of calculation, broken by intermittent
directness or frankness, have come to
be synonymous with lyric poetry itself.
Even half a millennium later, the
poem has some of the illicit freshness
of gossip. “They Flee from Me” acts as
though it possesses secrets that might
be deciphered by a coterie reader, even
one encountering it across the centu-
ries. To the noble ladies and gentlemen
who were its intended audience, some
of whom would soon be executed by
Henry VIII, the “she” whose unforget-
table remark still echoes in our ears
might have suggested Anne Boleyn
herself. Wyatt’s coded, deniable dis-
closures of an affair with the queen
can be found elsewhere in his work—in
“Whoso List to Hunt” and in a tantaliz-
ing epigram: “What word is that, that
changeth not, /Though it be turned and
made in twain?” The answer, which
Wyatt gives in the next line, is “Anna.”
The riddle is in one sense solved, but
the narrow answer does nothing to
dispel the darker and more lurid mys-
tery it implies. “Anna” is a name Anne
Boleyn sometimes used in correspon-
dence, and the Latinized form of her
name, Anna Bolina, appears under
many of her formal portraits. Though
changed into Anna, Anne “changeth
not.” Wyatt’s affair with Boleyn is still,
so far as I know, a matter of hearsay.
On Wyatt’s Wikipedia page, a subhead-
ing is labeled “Rumoured Affair with
Anne Boleyn.” The rumors that the
poem keeps alive in turn keep it alive.For a citizen of the Long Twentieth
Century like Murphy (and like me),
“They Flee from Me” carries a distinct
provenance, one that may be lost on my
students. As Murphy suggests, it is one
of the central poems of the New Criti-
cism, the influential critical practice
that came to dominate English depart-
ments after World War II. The New
Criticism was a method of formal anal-
ysis, but also a canon of texts, primar-
ily lyric poems, upon which the method
could be especially vividly demon-
strated. While its core method hashung on in the form of “close reading,”
which has proved durably essential to
the work of the literary classroom, its
canon, which was almost exclusively
white and male, has not. The prestige
of the lyric poem in the mid-twentieth
century depended upon its being a re-
pository of delicate ironies and “multi-
ple meanings,” which could be tweezed
out by eager undergraduates before the
bell rang.
The methods of the New Criticism,
as consolidated in books like Cleanth
Brooks’s An Approach to Literature,
borrowed from science a rational, evi-
dentiary approach to poems. We value
literature for “what sort of information
it gives,” according to Brooks’s intro-
duction to his textbook, and “how it isrelated to, and how it differs from, sci-
entific information.” These discrimina-
tions are to be made by looking always
at “a concrete case.” The rhetoric of
demonstrable, empirical “value” re-
placed the kind of language a student
might have encountered in a competing
textbook, The College Omnibus: “The
wish to spread the contagion of beauty,
whether it be the play of the fancy or
the emanation of truth, is the deep-
est reason for poetry.” The idea that
beauty could be “spread” like a sexu-
ally transmitted disease would not have
struck students as odd if they hadn’t
been trained to detect, under words
like “contagion,” something bizarre,
perhaps unintended (or not—which is
worse?), some undeclared spillover of
meaning. Brooks’s textbook provided
such training.
In the classroom, the New Criticism
standardized the experience of litera-
ture at a time when elite colleges were
being opened up to white men and
women from a wider range of socio-
economic backgrounds. Literature was
a new language, taught like any other,
with a rigorous first course in its gram-
mar and vocabulary. Up to that point,
English Literature had been an aura,
or a cologne, or an accessory for gentle-
men. At Amherst College, Theodore
Baird, one of the sentinels of applied
New Criticism, recalled a literature
professor of the older guard, David
Morton:He was a boxer and he would box
with his students.... I can remem-
ber once he came into the locker
room after having boxed with some
student or other and he wasn’t able
to speak because he had been hit sohard on the jaw it was numbed....
He taught a senior course on Mod-
ern Poetry, only he didn’t call it
Modern Poetry: he called it Moods
of the World Today.The cat’s cradle of meanings created
by a poem like “They Flee from Me”
might have been lost on students in
“Moods of the World Today,” though
its narrative would have appealed to
Morton, who “cultivated nostalgia and
liked the idea of meeting ladies in the
dark and talking with them and then
never seeing them again.”
But in other ways, “They Flee from
Me” is a terrible candidate for a New
Critical interpretation, partly because
the New Criticism sees every aspect of
a poem on a single, nonhistorical plane.
All the “multiple meanings” have to be
there at one time. The study of history
is deemed irrelevant. The story of the
poem’s unlikely survival in the wilds of
scholarship would probably not have
been introduced. Wyatt’s tactical cun-
ning, entirely an artifact of his time and
place—a means of self-preservation in
the Tudor court—might have been flat-
tened and turned into “wit,” a virtue
valuable for surviving department par-
ties. Murphy’s chapter on the New Crit-
icism suggests, in fact, how literature
professors in midcentury American
classrooms swelled by World War II
veterans turned their own operations
on poems into a kind of statecraft.
They were professor-soldiers, and the
sprezzatura could be felt in the room.
It was still the case when I was a stu-
dent that some of the senior and retired
members of English departments were
said to have honed their craft by deci-
phering Nazi code. At Harvard in the
1990s, before the arrival of Stephen
Greenblatt, the person who knew the
most about Wyatt was the distinguished
scholar Gwynne Evans, a kind, by then
elderly man with an office in Widener
Library full of antiquarian books that
he gave away to grad students. Evans
had worked at Bletchley Park and was
instrumental in cracking the Enigma
Code.
Murphy’s book ends before our cur-
rent era in literary instruction, which
is a shame. His own insights must have
been gathered from decades of teach-
ing the poem at Williams College, but
his classroom experience, which is it-
self a crucial part of the long tale of
“They Flee from Me,” is left mostly
implicit. The publication of this volume
is surely the biggest thing to happen to
Wyatt’s poem in at least a few genera-
tions. What led Murphy to make this
extraordinary intervention in its story?
For that matter, what has led me to read
and consider Murphy’s book, and to
write this review? Elite literary class-
rooms are now in the vanguard of so-
cial change. What does Murphy say to
his Williams students when they ask—
as my Wellesley students ask me—
about a poem in which, sure, a man
gives power to a woman, but doesn’t he
retain it as his to give away in the first
place? What does he say to a student
who rejects not only Wyatt’s original
scenario of love and loss, but the peda-
gogical scenario in which the poem is
introduced? I stammer out my hand-
me-down New Critical pieties about
multiple meanings, but what I’m really
thinking about is, why this poem, and
why this poem now? The abrupt ending
of Murphy’s one-of-a-kind study leaves
us all to answer the question. QAnne Boleyn; drawing by Hans Holbein
the Younger, circa 1533 –1536RoyalCollection^Trust