Ñàéò ïîå糿, â³ðø³, ïîçäîðîâëåííÿ ó â³ðøàõ :: Henry Howard :: Êðèòèêà

Henry Howard :: Êðèòèêà

The majority of Surrey's work was not published during his lifetime, but circulated in manuscript. The first significant publication of his works came in 1557, with Richard Tottel's printing of Songes and Sonettes (commonly known as Tottel's Miscellany). Although Surrey's name appears on the title page, he wrote less than a third of the book's contents, some forty poems. The remaining contributions have been attributed to Wyatt (ninety-six poems), Nicholas Grimald (forty poems), and various other authors who were collectively responsible for an additional ninety-five poems. Also in 1557 Surrey's blank verse translation of Books II and IV of Virgil's Aeneid appeared. Surrey additionally produced translations of several biblical psalms and a number of sonnets of the Italian poet Petrarch. More adaptations than true translations, Surrey's Petrarchan sonnets, along with those of Wyatt, represent the first poems in English to utilize the form. One of Surrey's best-known individual poems is “Spring Lament,” sometimes known by the beginning of its first line, “The Soote Season,” which adapts the conventions of Medieval amatory verse. Surrey's elegies include “So crewel prison,” mourning the death of the Duke of Richmond, the companion of Surrey's youth; “Norfolk Sprang Thee,” an epitaph on Thomas Clere, a family squire; and two elegies on Wyatt, the well-known “Wyatt resteth here” and a lesser-known sonnet based on one of Wyatt's poems. “Wyatt resteth here,” composed in 1542, at the time of Wyatt's death, was one of the few poems published in Surrey's lifetime, when it was printed around 1545 in An Excellent Epitaffe of syr Thomas wyat, with two other dytties. It has been called Surrey's most important single work, but is also considered his least characteristic, since it contains no personal references to his relationship to Wyatt or to his own grief at Wyatt's passing. Critical Reception As an innovator, Surrey is often credited with producing the first blank verse in the English language in his translation of the Aeneid, although this was not always acknowledged. According to Ants Oras, Surrey's “command of some of the finer points of blank verse technique seems … to have escaped the notice of literary critics.” O. B. Hardison, too, has observed out that “Surrey's achievement was ignored by his successors,” pointing out that John Milton, believing he was breaking new ground in Paradise Lost, “had to make many of Surrey's discoveries about heroic blank verse all over again.” Regarding Surrey's innovations in the sonnet form, Ivy L. Mumford has claimed that “Surrey was initiating a new stage of English Petrarchism in which it began to free itself from translation to establish some metrical independence of Italian sources.” In contrast, Emrys Jones has insisted that Surrey's “powers of invention and of forming independent structures were small,” and “in those places in the sonnets where he deserts Petrarch he usually exposes his incapacity.” W. A. Sessions has asserted that Surrey, in his elegy to Wyatt, invented a radical new role for the poet in England. “Surrey defines the ideological terms for the new poet of honor and nobility,” Sessions claims, and Surrey's own role thus shifted to that of aristocrat-poet. This was widely recognized in the later Renaissance as not only radical but as “a special moment of origin,” according to Sessions. Today, Surrey's accomplishments and innovations, particularly in his use of blank verse, are recognized as marking a significant development in the history of English poetry.