Structural Failure: Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch in Early Modern England

Abstract:In his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Francesco Petrarch introduced a new poetic strategy of deliberate and beneficial failure as a central requirement of literary love and a means of unifying a newly complex and fragmented literary subjectivity. In his rendering of Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt carries this celebration of necessary failure into the sixteenth century. By making Petrarchan failure central to his own concerns, Wyatt changes its fundamental nature. This is more than simply transferring the same narrative strategies into a new historical context. In lifting poetic love out of the realm of the spiritual, and rooting it firmly in the context of a purely secular striving, Wyatt effectively raises the stakes and alters the meaning of the poetic dynamic he embraces. What was, in Petrarch, a narrative strategy—an important part of the fictional construct—becomes for Wyatt, and the English Petrarchists who followed him, a structural element of the lyric form and a new basis for the construction of the literary self—I fail, therefore I am.