Alistair Fox’sPolitics and Literature, Colin Burrow breezily imputed an
essential misguidedness to Fox’s privileging of Skelton and his immediate
contemporaries.^4 Meyer-Lee, too, declares that despite Skelton’s far greater
formal and thematic range, and Wyatt’s narrowness,“to declare Wyatt’s
work regressive in comparison with Skelton seems odd”–a view, moreover,
that is imbued with the self-evidence of an“intuition.”^5 Some, however,
have seen Skelton, Hawes and Barclay as protomodern, withSpeke Parott
understood as a 1520 sWaste Land. Such readings risk being accused of
misrecognition (such poets are perfectly transparent when placed within a
properly formulated historical understanding) or relocated in conservative
generalities (a poem in chaos embodies a perception of the world in chaos,
“all coherence gone”).
It is certainly true that this period sees in English and Scottish court
poetry the explosion of a fragmenting and abrasive eclecticism, in which
signification goes violently awry, and the forms of love-allegory and dream
vision, along with imported forms of satire and pastoral, threaten to collapse
into incoherence under the pressure of something unspoken. Yet it will not
do, I think, simply to reduce what is going on here to the impact of political
terror on a presumed norm of“plain speaking.”The effect of a rather
exhausting bricolage might rather be traced to the workings of allegory itself,
as preferred mode of self-presentation. Gordon Teskey, working from
Walter Benjamin’s reading of allegory as the realm of the corpse– the
space where the body dies into signification–sees in personification the
concealment of a violence. He writes, however, that“the violence inside
personification is exposed when thatfigure is...turned inside out.”What
becomes visible is“the truth over which allegory is always drawing its veil:
the fundamental disorder out of which the illusion of order is raised.”
Writing emerges as a material trace that marks a“violent”distance from
an allegorical center.^6 Working, as I have tried to do throughout, from such a
sense of what allegory might mean, with its interchange of partial objects and
absent centers, I would like to close with twofigural bodies, one English, one
Scottish, which seem to summarize some important cultural differences.
Skelton’s last poem,A Replycacion Agaynst Certayne Yonge Scolers Abjured
of Late, printed in 1528 , has been noted for its programmatic statement of
the disembodied nature of poetic inspiration:
...there is a spyrituall,
And a mysteriall,
And a mysticall
Effecte energiall,
As Grekes do it call,Conclusion 169