Wyatt, Thomas (c. 1503–1542)

English courtier and poet. His poetry, like that of the Earl of Surrey, often experimented with verse forms associated with Italian poet Petrarch and so may be credited with introducing the sonnet into English literature. His poetry was originally written to be passed from hand to hand among the courters – and so probably tells us more about courtly fashions than Wyatt's personal outlook. Only a very few of his poems were printed in his lifetime; like Surrey (who wrote an epitaph (memorial) upon Wyatt), his works were first collected together in Totell's Miscellany (1557).

Wyatt came from a Yorkshire family and was educated at Cambridge. He was employed on diplomatic missions by Henry VIII, but in 1536 was imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London, suspected of having been the lover of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn. Knighted in 1537 and sent on an embassy to Spain, Wyatt was again arrested in 1541 on charges of treason.

Whatever the truth of the accusations of his relations with Anne Boleyn (and much has been read into several poems), Wyatt was well acquainted with the evangelicals at Henry's court; one of his patrons was Thomas Cromwell. His first literary work was a prose translation of a Greek text by Plutarch (from the Latin version of Budé); it was dedicated to Catherine of Aragon and printed by Richard Pynson in around 1528. His poems show a similar interest in humanist fashions: apart from his debt to Petrarch, he certainly also knew, for example, Pietro Aretino's version of the penitential psalms, and Castiglione'sThe Courtier. Some of his verses are also paraphrases of classical sources like Seneca.