Connecting with Vanished Worlds

Sometimes the most interesting questions are the ones you never think to ask.

I recently finished Hilary Mantel’s historical novel about the downfall of Anne Boleyn, Bring Up the Bodies. Thomas Wyatt is an intriguing minor character¹ in the novel: A knight, a talented poet, admired by his fellow courtiers, rumored to be a former lover of Anne Boleyn. Yet at a time when Anne’s rumored lovers are being rounded up and executed for treason, Wyatt somehow emerges alive from the Tower of London. Wanting to know a little more about Wyatt, I pulled my copy of the poetry textbook and anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry by Helen Vendler off my bookshelf. Very early in that book, on page 16, Vendler includes Thomas Wyatt’s poem “They Flee from Me,” selecting it as one of her main examples of “the poem as life” — how poetry can be written about any facet of human existence.² What I didn’t think to ask, when I read that poem: Thomas Wyatt lived five hundred years ago. How did his writing wind up in a book on my shelf half a millennium later?

Luckily, Peter Murphy thought to ask and answer that question in his book The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem. Reading his book reminded me how living in the Internet Era has convinced the world to believe one big lie: That everything everybody does will be effortlessly remembered forever. That’s not true now, and it certainly wasn’t true five hundred years ago.³ Murphy’s book traces the improbable sequence of events that allowed Wyatt’s words to escape oblivion and travel through the centuries to us today.

Remember the pressure the ruling elite felt in Tudor times: Everybody was related to everybody else by blood or marriage. In this tightly knit, incestuous environment, it was difficult to keep secrets. Your fortune could change suddenly and unpredictably with the whims of the monarch. This world created an art form, court poetry, where ambiguity was the point. Court poetry was art that was designed to be overheard, but where indirectness and multiple layers of meaning offered both a level of protection as well as a way to advertise your skills as a courtier (discretion, eloquence, flattery).

This is the world Wyatt operated in, and he was one of the most accomplished at this form. You can see it in “They Flee from Me:” Wyatt was probably thinking of a specific former lover who spurned him when he wrote the poem. Others in the inner circle probably knew who he was writing about. However, there’s nothing at all incriminating in his stanzas. Everything is implied, discreet: Just the way a skilled courtier should communicate. However, Murphy points out in his book that because Wyatt’s words are not about a specific ex-lover or specific incident, they have the latent ability to “jump” out of this inner circle and be enjoyed by others… if there was some way for others to hear or read those words.

Although the printing press existed, Wyatt did not seek to publish his poems. Why bother? He was not writing for a general audience, nor was he writing for “posterity.” He wrote to impress the small circle of his fellow ruling elite in Tudor England. Murphy points out that Wyatt probably knew the names of every person he expected to read the poem “They Flee from Me” — probably 1-2 dozen. He didn’t need a publisher to reach his intended audience. Instead, he paid a secretary to create a beautiful handwritten copy, which he then initialed to show his approval. Here it is:⁴

Wyatt’s friends also made copies of his poems. There is a contemporaneous copy of “They Flee from Me,” with slight modifications, in a manuscript maintained by Mary Fitzroy (neé Howard). There were probably other handwritten copies at the time. This scratching of ink on paper kept Wyatt’s poetry from vanishing during a critical time: The period between Wyatt’s death in 1542, when his poetry disappeared from living memory, and when his poems finally successfully “jumped” out of the inner circle and into the wider world with the publication of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557.

Tottel’s Miscellany was an Elizabethan anthology of English poetry, much of it written by Wyatt and his friend and protégé Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The publisher of Tottel’s Miscellany, Richard Tottel, must have gotten copies of some of the manuscripts shared by Wyatt and his friends. Because people of every time and place want to peek into the private lives of the rich and famous, and because court poetry was ambiguous enough that it could be about anybody, Tottel had a hit on his hands. The book was enormously popular in its era, and Tottel published several editions. Shakespeare probably owned a copy. This book kept Wyatt’s poetry alive for another generation, but it also introduced a new problem. Every time “They Flee from Me” was copied — from Wyatt’s manuscript to Mary Fitzroy’s, from manuscript to Tottel’s printed copy, and then through successive editions of Tottel’s Miscellany — it changed, ever so slightly. Words were changed. Words were dropped. Irregularities in the meter were smoothed out. In poetry, every breath and syllable matters. At what point does what comes off the printing press stop being Wyatt’s work?

This particular question went unasked for a hundred years or more as Wyatt’s work sat mostly forgotten on bookshelves of private manor libraries. In this era, it appears that people valued Wyatt’s manuscript more for its paper than for what was written on it. The image of the written copy of “They Flee from Me,” above, is a cropped image of the entire page. If you were to zoom out and include the full margins, you’ll see that someone had been using the paper to solve math problems! (Parts of that are visible on the left in the cropped image.)⁵

Murphy’s book points to the rise of “scholarship” in the eighteenth century as the next stage in the life of “They Flee from Me.” Finally, a large enough network of people interested in studying the words of the past emerged; scholars noticed the differences between the different versions, and eventually realized how a single handwritten copy was the right authority to turn to when determining Wyatt’s intent. Murphy’s book made me appreciate the difficulty faced by scholars and editors when piecing together conflicting fragments of writing that come to us from the past, as well as how hard it is to balance respect for the source material and the desire to modernize spelling and punctuation to reach a wider audience.

Scholars and editors recovered the text of “They Flee from Me” and made it accessible to readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. At that point, the birth of “English Literature” as a thing worthy of study and the birth of “English Professor” as an occupation lead to the final stage in the lifecycle of “They Flee from Me:” Professors and critics made the poem popular. This section of Murphy’s book made me uneasy. In his telling, the inclusion of Wyatt’s poem in modern poetry anthologies largely comes from the works of critics in the early years of the 20th century who believe, as Murphy puts it, that “institutional literary education is not only a learning of facts: it is a sorting mechanism, in which the best literature is appreciated by the best people.” Those professors decided “They Flee from Me” was part of the best literature that the best people should appreciate.⁶ Thus, it found its way into the textbooks and anthologies they created. Wyatt’s poetry began as a way for the elite to communicate. Now, studying “They Flee from Me” was a way to craft a new elite.

Perhaps because Murphy is an English professor himself, and even though The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem is published by an academic press, he gently mocks this stage of the poem’s life. In a way, things have come full circle. In Tudor England, courtiers wrote poems to show off their skill with words and get themselves noticed. In modern academia, professors write papers explaining what those poems “mean” — papers typically much longer and drier than the poems themselves. But the papers are a way for the professors to show off their skill with words and get themselves noticed…

I love that Peter Murphy took such time and care to trace the journey of “They Flee from Me” from Thomas Wyatt’s brain to ours. It was a longer, stranger, more perilous, and more interesting journey than I expected. I no longer take for granted that the works of the past are available for us in the present to read.⁷ The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also shows there’s something more meaningful than the “you should read poetry to join the elite” argument. Instead, read poetry and literature — especially old poetry and literature — to connect. I can’t say things any better than Murphy does himself, in his final paragraph of his conclusion:

So, then, why old poetry, that good question? Because old poems show us we have a history of trying. Because they show us that people were like us, in the past, even if their likeness can be discerned only through an exercise of the imagination. Because the effort of connecting with vanished worlds is salutary. Because working out what someone else was thinking is good practice for knowing other people and treating them humanely. Because literacy is a claim against disorder and dissolution, and we need that claim.