Conclusion
This study breaks off–with, as we shall see shortly, one exception–in 1528.
Much critical attention, of a high order, has homed in on the 1530 s, and
Puttenham’s“new company of courtly makers,”who, chiefly in the persons
of Wyatt and Surrey,“pollished our rude and homely maner of vulgar
Poesie.”^1 The immediate causes of this distinctiveness have not been far to
seek. Greg Walker sees in the 1530 s generation in England a voice“created
out of the intense political pressure of Henrician tyranny,”a tyranny that
even in the 1520 s had seemed scarcely imaginable. The result is a poetry that
suggests“a wider instability in the very categories of knowledge prompted
by the unfixing of the realm”and“afluidity of sexual relationships”that
bespeaks a“moral and political amnesia”at its heart.^2 Robert Meyer-Lee
finds in Wyatt’s poetry an intersection between Lydgate’s“laureate poetics”
and the verse offin amorwhich“had served the elite as a demonstration of
their facility with language and their deep capacity for refined sentiment.”^3
Yet the poetic traditions of England and Scotland–traditions that cannot
be considered apart from the shaping significance of the European versions
ofditand love-allegory–had long been inflected withamour courtoisby the
time Wyatt reached them, and the love-lyric, as Boffey shows, had moved
some way from its elite pretensions. Moments of poetic signature –
“Geffrey”’s woeful distance from love-tidings in the Hous of Fame,
Gower’sfinal recognition by Venus–are profoundly inflected by thefigure
of the cleric-poet and his complex relationship to desire and writing. It has
been part of my project to argue that the work of Skelton and his contem-
poraries is in part motivated by a bid to counterpoint the neo-Latin writing
dominant at the English court at the sixteenth century’s beginning with an
erotic language of secrecy that imports significant revisions in its imagining
of the authority to which it subscribes.
As significantly, however, I have tried to show that the generic fragmen-
tation that presents itself as part of these poets’enterprises is not well served
by an historicism that has often domesticated them. In 1990 , reviewing
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