Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th-century English politician, ambassador, and lyric poet credited with introducing the sonnet to English literature. He was born at Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent, though the family was originally from Yorkshire. His family adopted the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. His mother was Anne Skinner, and his father Henry, who had earlier been imprisoned and tortured by Richard III, had been a Privy Councillor of Henry VII and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, KG was an English nobleman, politician and poet. He was one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry and was the last known person to have been executed at the instance of King Henry VIII. His name is usually associated in literature with that of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Owing largely to the powerful position of his father Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, Henry took a prominent part in court life, and served as a soldier both in France and in Scotland. He was a man of reckless temper, which involved him in many quarrels, and finally brought upon him the wrath of the ageing Henry VIII. He was arrested, tried for treason and beheaded on Tower Hill.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1557.
"To Autumn" is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats. The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. "To Autumn" is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 odes". Although personal problems left him little time to devote to poetry in 1819, he composed "To Autumn" after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year after the publication of "To Autumn", Keats died in Rome.
Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. The form enjoyed significant success in the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century. It has had a more subdued but continuing influence on English verse in more recent centuries.
Lady Margaret Lee was an English courtier. She was a sister of the poet Thomas Wyatt and a friend of Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII of England. Historians have speculated that she may have been present during Boleyn's execution.
Stephen Hawes was a popular English poet during the Tudor period who is now little known.
Songes and Sonettes, usually called Tottel's Miscellany, was the first printed anthology of English poetry. First published by Richard Tottel in 1557 in London, it ran to many editions in the sixteenth century.
"Ode on Melancholy" is one of five odes composed by English poet John Keats in the spring of 1819, along with "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on Indolence", and "Ode to Psyche". The narrative of the poem describes the poet's perception of melancholy through a lyric discourse between the poet and the reader, along with the introduction to Ancient Grecian characters and ideals.
Serafino dell'Aquila or Aquilano, also called by the family name dei Ciminelli, was an Italian poet and musician. As a writer he was one of the foremost of the stylistic followers of Petrarch and his work was later influential on both French and English Petrarchan poets.
In poetry, a fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven iambic feet, for which the style is also called iambic heptameter. It is most commonly found in English poetry produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fourteeners often appear as rhymed couplets, in which case they may be seen as ballad stanza or common metre hymn quatrains in two rather than four lines.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard, the poem was completed when Gray was living near the Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges. It was sent to his friend Horace Walpole, who popularised the poem among London literary circles. Gray was eventually forced to publish the work on 15 February 1751 in order to preempt a magazine publisher from printing an unlicensed copy of the poem.
Elizabeth Brooke, Lady Wyatt (1503–1560) was the wife of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, and the mother of Thomas Wyatt the younger who led Wyatt's Rebellion against Mary I. Her parents were Thomas Brooke, 8th Baron Cobham and Dorothy Heydon, the daughter of Sir Henry Heydon. She was the sister of George Brooke, 9th Baron Cobham and was considered a possible candidate for the sixth wife of Henry VIII of England.
Elizabeth Darrell was the long-term mistress and muse of Sir Thomas Wyatt. They had one surviving child, Francis. Wyatt was married to Elizabeth Brooke, Lady Wyatt whom he had accused of committing adultery, resulting in their separation. She was later rumoured to have been involved with Henry VIII.
"The Flea" is an erotic metaphysical poem by John Donne (1572–1631). The exact date of its composition is unknown, but it is probable that Donne wrote this poem in the 1590s when he was a young law student at Lincoln's Inn, before he became a respected religious figure as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral. The poem uses the conceit of a flea, which has sucked blood from the male speaker and his female lover, to serve as an extended metaphor for the relationship between them. The speaker tries to convince a lady to sleep with him, arguing that if their blood mingling in the flea is innocent, then sexual mingling would also be innocent. His argument hinges on the belief that bodily fluids mix during sexual intercourse.
"Night" is a poem in the illuminated 1789 collection Songs of Innocence by William Blake, later incorporated into the larger compilation Songs of Innocence and of Experience. "Night" speaks about the coming of evil when darkness arrives, as angels protect and keep the sheep from the impending dangers.
The Ode to Aphrodite is a lyric poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, in which the speaker calls on the help of Aphrodite in the pursuit of a beloved. The poem survives in almost complete form, with only two places of uncertainty in the text, preserved through a quotation from Dionysius of Halicarnassus' treatise On Composition and in fragmentary form in a scrap of papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
Edythe Mae Gordon was an African-American writer of short stories and poetry during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Gordon primarily published her work in the Quill Club, a Boston-based publication founded by her husband Eugene Gordon and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Helene Johnson and Dorothy West. The most well known example of her work was published after her death, Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon, as part of a project to support and reintroduce African-American women writers between 1910 and 1940, written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jennifer Burton, and Lorraine Elena Roses.
Nicola Shulman Phipps, Marchioness of Normanby , is a British biographer, former model, and aristocrat. After her marriage in 1990 she initially became Countess of Mulgrave and since 1994 she has been known as Nicola Phipps, Marchioness of Normanby.
Sappho 94, sometimes known as Sappho's Confession, is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. The poem is written as a conversation between Sappho and a woman who is leaving her, perhaps in order to marry, and describes a series of memories of their time together. It survives on a sixth-century AD scrap of parchment. Scholarship on the poem has focused on whether the initial surviving lines of the poem are spoken by Sappho or the departing woman, and on the interpretation of the eighth stanza, possibly the only mention of homosexual activities in the surviving Sapphic corpus.
