Thomas Wyatt's Epistolary Satires: Parody and the Limitations of Rhetorical Humanism

Abstract

Thomas Wyatt's writing regularly engages the tensions underlying early-sixteenth-century humanist rhetoric. While works such as his 1527 rendition of Plutarch's the Quyete of Mynde and his 1541 Defence on charges of treason tend to convey a humanist confidence in the persuasive power of language, his most haunting and famous poems portray language very differently: as a corrupt human creation unable to communicate the inner self to others and consequently helpless to establish human bonds or human community. This essay seeks to demonstrate, by focusing on Wyatt's three epistolary satires, how the mature poet strives to reconcile, through the creation of a more indirect and "parodic" mode of rhetorical persuasion, his pessimistic poetic vision with the more rationalistic and optimistic goals of Erasmian humanism.

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