Writing under the menacing power of Henry VIII, Thomas Wyatt is the first unequivocally great lyric poet of modern (albeit early modern) English, and his poems are occasioned, more often than not, by the ebbing of political favor. They are unlike any other poems probably because Wyatt is unlike any other poet in the language, more beholden and vulnerable to sovereign power than any poet of similar talent. They are resolutely public, and resolutely political, even when most vulnerable and intimate because they understand intimacy at court to be appreciable only in relation to Henry. On the face of it, Wyatt’s poems are often written as court games, responding to the loss of favor of a lady, or to the loss of fortune in the games of courtly life—and sometimes allowing us to see the loss of something else: the [JS1] king’s favor, and the menace it entails. 

Wyatt’s poetry is astonishing not merely because of where and when it was written, or to whom he may have been writing, but because of how it apprehends power as a field of silent pressure, mysterious to the touch, unyielding and unresponsive to ambition, desire, and even language. The game of power—true politics—and the source of power—true sovereignty—transcends everything in the poetry but cannot be situated. Power is [JS2] always displaced from view by the circumstances of its operation and often displaces those upon whom it operates so that they no longer have access to its source. This is the mystery of Wyatt’s poetry, central to its uncanny effect: it is self-conscious of its political standing, and that self-consciousness is heightened by what is not named, specified, or even circumvented in conspicuous artistic evasion.

The mystery is generated by the ways in which  Wyatt’s imagination reconciles two extremes, which are not often brought together in poetry. On the one hand, the recurrent raising of possibilities without definitive closure, so that the identity of things and people cannot be known with certainty. This is the opposite of a hidden code, wherein there is a solution; instead, it involves a continual suspension of identity, the poems on the edge of the fog bank of possibilities—in which something is moving, with unknown motive, leaving room for doubt, and exacerbating the isolation of the poet. This fog itself, with the possibilities it spawns—the fathomless reasons of Henry, the rumors of courtly life, the manipulations of courtly factions (Cromwell v. More, most famously)—is Henry’s power; it is a way of not-seeing, rather than something seen. On the other hand, the poems draw into themselves, immobilized by that fog into a defensive posture, whose strength is felt in standing rather than running from their new isolation. The poems sometimes feel written from a place of exile, not because Wyatt has been expelled, but because (in another figure) the sea has receded from their coasts, waste sand now surrounding them. Their personhood emerges in their self-consciousness of not being able to act. It would be irresponsible to say in any simple sense that they are poems of resistance. Instead, they are poems that recover autonomy, by knowing their straitened conditions, by knowing that they cannot and will not resist except by preservation. What is preserved is, ultimately, the imagined selfhood of the poet realized as a poem, and also the language by which such selfhood is constituted, a language that, though limited in what it can apprehend, and worn to the sinews of expression, is cherished—claimed—as the poem’s. Even when the poems despair, the terms of despair are strong.

A fair number of poems attributed to Wyatt were not written by him and there remains disagreement over which he did write.[i] But there is one poem I know that is admittedly not written by Wyatt, not even claiming to want to have been—though it  [JS3] may very well have winked in Wyatt’s direction. This is from Chapter 12 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. 

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”

These were the verses the White Rabbit read:

“They told me you had been to her

And mentioned me to him:

She gave me a good character,

But said I could not swim.

He sent them word I had not gone

(We know it to be true):

If she should push the matter on,

What would become of you?

I gave her one, they gave him two,

You gave us three or more;

They all returned from him to you,

Though they were mine before.

If I or she should chance to be

Involved in this affair,

He trusts you to set them free,

Exactly as we were.

My notion was that you had been

(Before she had this fit)

An obstacle that came between

Him, and ourselves, and it

Don’t let him know she liked them best

For this must ever be

A secret, kept from all the rest,

Between yourself and me.”

“That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet,” said the King, rubbing his hands; “so now let the jury—”

“If any one of them can explain it,” said Alice, (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn’t a bit afraid of interrupting him), “I’ll give him sixpence. I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”

The jury all wrote down on their slates, “She doesn’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it,” but none of them attempted to explain the paper.

Hugh Kenner quipped that the Alice novels mark the beginning of modern literature; Hugh Trevor-Roper said something analogous about politics under Cromwell and the court [JS4] of Henry VIII. Maybe, just as Alice acts older than she is, the novels are older in spirit than in publication date. 

The White Rabbit’s poem, presented as evidence before the King, works because of the play of pronouns, always pointing, always blaming, always displacing the clinching act of identifying; something is always moving beyond the poem’s statements, and you have to be in the know to know. Alice is saying that there’s no “there” there in the poem as a poem: it does not contain within itself sufficient consciousness of what it’s about; it remains a part of someone else’s understanding of life, and that other person has disappeared from view.

Wyatt’s poems are not part of someone else’s understanding—but they are at the mercy of it—so the open possibilities to which they point are the actual uncertainties of how another might act and what another might intend (An island is not part of the sea, but it is at its mercy).

Wyatt does not go to the same nonsensical extremes as Carroll but his pronouns do similar work: they gesture towards, without identifying, the figures moving around him, cirumspectrally, beyond his full apprehension. By means of pronouns, he flaunts what we cannot know for sure, what nobody could know for sure—he places us in a place of precarious knowledge, set against his knowingness. In the well-known lyric, “They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” the third-person pronoun is exchanged, in the second stanza, for a more specific referent, “once in special | When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall.” 

For Wyatt, pronouns carry the burden of mystery, the sharp point of accusation, and also the danger of discovery. Granted, it is difficult to imagine how Wyatt might have written lines from “They Flee from Me” without deploying pronouns where and how he does:

And I have leave to go of her goodness

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

But what matters is not whether other words might have been deployed so much as that the context of the poem has invested these pronouns with a charge that belies their frequency and inevitability in the English language. And it is perhaps on account of their being as frequent and inevitable as they are that they are is so bluntly felt; there is no walking around them, but there is also no walking through them. 

Sweating, in many poems, his precarious place, Wyatt turns to advantage the precarious referential pointing that pronouns normally do; we all know their precariousness from writing and speaking, when a clause throws into doubt the antecedent or object of an “it” or a “she.”

Two other ways stand out as features of words and wording in Wyatt’s precarious verse. One is a delight in puns, and a delight in one pun in particular. Here is the first stanza of “In faith I not well what to say”:

In faith I not well what to say,

Thy chances been so wondrous,

Thou Fortune, with thy diverse play

That causes joy full dolorous

And eke the same right joyous.

Yet though thy chain hath me enwrapped,

Spite of thy hap, hap hath well happed.

Hap as chance; hap as happiness; hap as an intention; and, I speculate but no doubt there is some critical-scholarly remark somewhere that settles the matter, hap also as a thin echo of “hope,” another keystone in the Wyatt lexicon of precarious living (alongside the redress that may not come, though hoped for, or that will come by hap, if it come at all). In the protean turns of the word’s sense, Wyatt finds a response to the “protean callousness” that Geoffrey Hill identifies in Wyatt’s purview. And finally, the poem is structured by a principle common to the continental traditions and forms upon which Wyatt drew—the refrain. But the refrain is touched, and touches on, the precarious, too. Here is “Is it Possible?,” a poem attributed to Wyatt in one of the surviving manuscript collections of his verse: 

Is it possible

That so high debate,

So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,

Should end so soon and was begun so late?

Is it possible?

Is it possible

So cruel intent,

So hasty heat and so soon spent,

From love to hate, and thence for to relent?

Is it possible?

Is it possible

That any may find

Within one heart so diverse mind,

To change or turn as weather and wind?

Is it possible?

Is it possible

To spy it in an eye

That turns as oft as chance on die,

The truth whereof can any try?

Is it possible?

It is possible

For to turn so oft,

To bring that lowest which was most aloft,

And to fall highest yet to light soft:

It is possible.

All is possible

Whoso list believe.

Trust therefore first, and after prove,

As men wed ladies by licence and leave

All is possible.

The refrain takes many guises in Wyatt’s poetry—sometimes a metrical recurrence, more often a variation on a phrase (in “The heart and service to you proffered”; “But take it to you gently”; “Of him that loves you faithfully”; “Therefore accept it lovingly”; “To be your servant secretly”; “Reward your servant liberally.”). Sometimes it repeats with more, sometimes less variation, and sometimes a repeated phrase set each time in a different broader phrase (in “Suffering in sorrow, in hope to attain,” we find ‘serve and suffer’ repeated in each line of the refrain, but each line of the refrain a different phrase as a whole). [JS5] On each occasion there is something to be said for, to, about the precarious: that the meaning of a phrase can shift so slightly and significantly in orientation when set anew; that stability of meter and rhythm may guarantee order, but only against much that is in flux; that a necessary, fixed attitude— “patience” or “serve and suffer” —needs to be repeated, fixed in place, as a last, desperate stay against all that is not ensured. 

In “Is it Possible,” as in other poems, Wyatt bemoans the constancy of the refrain to which he must returns but then reorients it on its axis. “Is it possible” starts with a question of disbelief and transforms into a sardonic rhetorical question, the answer to which, he implies, we know damn well to be “yes.” He lives in the contingent reality of the possible, where nothing is truly actual because everything is subject to change—except of course the refrain itself. Yet he can be, must be, confident in the necessity of the refrain he sings on account of the world’s offering so little else of which he can be confidently assured. It yields to something firmer than a question. When he arrives the statement, “it is possible,” possibility is always actually the case, and what is actual exists as a flicker of one possibility among many. Fortune is fickle, not a constant wheel. But the poem goes further, to the final stanza, where “it” becomes “all.” “It is “all of the above” and “what is at hand,” but “all” extends indefinitely, which is why “All is possible” sounds with religious overtones. For God, “all is possible.” But the hope the phrase is intended to supply is here a threat: anything can happen at this court, under this king. “Whoso list believe” again pulls in the direction of religious faith: For God, all is possible, if you will just believe. And then in the penultimate line, the poem pushes against the divine range of reference: these are human affairs, a wedding vow. All is possible, as it is possible that men wed women and leave. This crashes the poem down to earth; what had seemed a religious sentiment is embittered by experience. Trust first and then prove: but the proof of experience will establish that all is possible, and that possibility tends to disappoint because it denies not constancy, but the adherence to truth and good faith that unites. 

But I don’t think the religious meaning can be simply excluded. Wyatt uses the language of faith and trust in God; he admits into the poem the grounds that something unexpected might happen. It would not merely be simplistic to say “all is possible and that means everything will always get worse,” but it would be self-contradictory. Instead, the final poem spans the domestic and the sublime, the political and the divine, optimism and pessimism: those are all possible. But all of those being possible leaves us to fall back on the inner citadel of stoicism. Samuel Beckett enjoyed the apocryphal saying of Augustine discussing the two thieves crucified next to Christ: “one was saved, do not despair; one was damned, do not presume.” The inner citadel of stoicism is that imagined vantage point upon which we can rest and shelter whatever storms around us; it is the selfhood within the besieged self. It is, for Wyatt, the poem itself that comes to resemble the inner citadel—a deeper self, suffering the fickle assaults and withdrawal of power that paradoxically invest it with an autonomy that unites it as a whole.

I’ve already mentioned Thomas Wyatt’s most famous poem, “They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” but it is worth considering at length because of its deep and sustained imagining of displacement by and from power:

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek

That now are wild, and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better, but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

Therewithal sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

.

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking,

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served,

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

.

“Newfangledness” is not exactly a new word. “Newfangled” is from the fifteenth century, the first recorded use in the OED dating to 1492. But the “ness,” the conversion of adjective to noun, is a new turn in the language, it would seem, the earliest recording being roughly contemporary with Wyatt’s poem. This is a word about novelty that evidences what it accuses in her, so that it sneers, as if it were the sort of word she would use. It is a word that testifies not so much to novelty as to change, to the “continual change” that characterizes the poem. The changes are registered variously, first in the alteration from the third person plural, “they” and “them” in the first stanza, to the “her” in the second. The first stanza is plural because he has been isolated not just from her but from everyone at court, from all of the sources of delight, the birds or deer (“flee” could mean “fly,” so they are birds eating from his hand, but “gentle, tame, and meek”  and “now are wild” recalls the “tame”  and “wild” of the hind in final line of “Whoso list to hunt.”) But this is also a change, not of heart, but of his perception of his own heart, since it is not just “once in special” that he recalls, not just one occasion, but one in special, who is emblematically figured in “loose gown from her shoulders did fall.”

The changes are also figural: the “they” of the opening stanza stalk with naked food and then are transformed into animals eating from his hand; they are perhaps hinds, but then in the second stanza, she is the human, calling him a “heart,” with a pun on “hart,” and he is “caught in her arms,” tamed by her. In those lines is compressed an entire erotic episode, all of which depends on the particular specificity of “loose” and “shoulders”  and “long and small” meeting against the occluded sexual act, the body left undescribed and unespied, and the tantalizing vagueness of “this”: rhyming with “kiss” but exceeding it, not least because that line could not be spoken while kissing. “It was no dream: I lay broad waking” needs to be past because of what he does not want to say: “I lie broad waking,” but that he “lay” on his back broad waking during sex; if this is so, it might have had cultural implications, as there were norms around the proper positions for sex and which were considered effeminate. The word “but” marks the cruelest change of the poem. It could  have been “Now all is changed.” Instead the word “but” contravenes the phrase “lay broad waking,” as if he thought it a possibility that “lay broad waking” might have gone on forever, or as if it might only have been a dream. It was not a dream, but it was as good as a dream: the real change is from what is real to what is a fiction. The fiction is one under which he must live, and which he can only stand against by means of the poem that is itself artifice, a sort of false utterance that could be disowned, if needed. [JS6] “But all” picks up what has been dissolved, the “all” that was in the thrilling embrace of “therewithall sweetly did me kiss.”

And at this turn from the thought that he was awake into the reality that might as well be a dream, he is brought to something near double-speak in the final stanza: “all is turned through my gentleness| to a strange fashion of forsaking” might mean that it is on account of his willing gentleness—his code of gentlemen—or it might mean that it has been played and preyed upon, and “strange fashion of forsaking” suggests that the fashion is itself novel or uncertain, not his own, so that in this final stanza, where the “I” is affirmed four times, where the agency of the subject is insisted upon after appearing only once before, in the spectatorial, “I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,” it is also the moment where the “I” is most isolated. That earlier “I,” on re-reading, exercises a similar force to those in the last stanza: it insists on what was. He himself saw; it is not just, we must hear, an affirmation of what happened around him, but that he was himself there, that he is himself. This becomes apparent by the last stanza, where the poet is trying to insist that he has some self that can act at all; the “strange fashion of forsaking” extends to his self-forsaking, his having been made to forsake not just her but his memory of the past. At the moment the first-person asserts itself most, the first-person is most compromised, and the words “I have leave to go” and “am served” suggest, with irony that is not simple sarcasm, the power that he has lost. [JS7] The phrases “I have leave to go” and “am served” are not uttered withsimple sarcasm of understatements. He really was handled all of the violence of which courtly decorum was possible, but also without the fullest violence that this decorum suppresses. He  might have faced worse consequences had he not been gentle; his gentleness has allowed him to participate in the “strange fashion of forsaking” that is civilized, courtly propriety. From the perspective of the king, he has had leave to go, though not to go on. “Kindly” is sarcastic, but “kindness” has a double edged sword not just of goodness, sensitivity, compassion, but according to nature, and this way of behaving is in the nature of things at court, the nature of kings.[JS8] 

The ambivalence is at its height in the closing couplet. “Since” suggests that he “fain would know” as a consequence of his being “so kindly served,” but also his wanting to know in light of his being so kindly served. His own punishment makes him curious to know if she has the equivalent, whether he is bitterly suggesting that she has suffered less, has betrayed even the memory of him to save herself, or whether he feels compassion and concern for her fate. “Deserved” though is not “served”: it entails receiving, but suggests moral dessert; its uncertainty, the edge of contempt, comes in the friction between what she deserved in the terms of an impartial and true judgment, and what she has deserved in the eyes of those with power. It draws attention at the final moment to the impotence of deserving in the sense of receiving one’s due; it draws attention to the masquerade of justice that is the court. The key word of that line, though, is “fain”:  it is a word of understatement, a mild preference that stands apart from the intense desire towards her he once felt. “Fain” catches just enough of the tincture of desire to remind us of how far removed he is from the erotic. And, though not a pun, it cannot but carry in the potential of “feign,” I would “pretend to know” or really, with the two meanings of “fain” folded in, “I would pretend to want to know,” as if surrendering to the pretense under which he now must live, or is acknowledging that the poem is a compromise with fiction, not because what it says is untrue but because it cannot say the whole truth, because it needs to, as Bob Dylan sings, “rearrange their faces and give them all another name” (“Desolation Row”).

None of this tilts too much into scorn, contempt, or sarcasm. There is a genuine desire to know; the entire last stanza is honest in what it says, a true account of things, but in being a true account, its indictment is all the greater: this way of speaking—of saying he has had leave, that he is served, that it has been turned through his gentleness, even that he has been used kindly—is all accurate enough, the words being the correct words to use, in so far as they are the terms of truth in the court—but it is the court itself that makes truth in any meaningful sense impossible; it is a field of deception. Over the course of this whole poem, Wyatt plays with the games of truth: the first stanza invents the fiction of allegory, the figures coming to feed from his hand animals on a tapestry. Then there is the memory that is true but that might as well be a dream, and that, regardless of its being a real memory, cannot be fully faced by the words of the poem, but is suppressed as a bliss of consummation in the word, and after the word “this”; then there is the equivocation of the last stanza. And nowhere is Henry or the king mentioned; nowhere do we know who has made Wyatt suffer, or even that he has been punished; he maintains a perfect decorum to complain about his loss. And even as the decorum feels hollow, Wyatt’s isolation within it, and because of it, is deeply felt. His isolation and exile from his past, and himself, is not, in the poem, a function of Henry or any particular malevolent intention or design; it is felt in the language itself, its resistance to the truth of his own experience, and so by the poem’s end, as much as he yearns for her, he is also pained by the falseness of what he lives with in her absence, by the terms he has been allotted to make sense of his situation.

That is in part why the first line of the second stanza seems so disarming in its frankness: “Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise.” It’s a peculiar line, the tone not quite at one with the quiet perplexity and despairing regret that we find elsewhere; it is the least disoriented of the poem’s lines, in its manner; even when in her embrace, the line “dear heart, how like you this” disorients both in its implied transformation (to a hart) and in the uncertainty of “this,” which seems to have caught even the poet by surprise, as if she had shifted her hand unexpectedly. At any rate, “Thanked be to fortune” has none of that; in it, Wyatt knows where his gratitude is owed. Is it gratitude? Is this hearty “Thanked be to fortune” scornful at all. Has not fortune served him ill in other respects? I do not think it has the ambivalence that we would expect; he is lost in reverie, but he is also able to hold out hope that fortune, of all the forces at work in his world, is greater than the power of a monarch. “Thanked be to fortune it hath been otherwise” does not say, but might be thought to imagine: “and might be otherwise again.” The gratitude is real: the universe is not to be abandoned to despair. This is not just Wyatt’s most perfect poem, but it is also one of those perfect poems in the language; it lies intently within the present of its utterance, but the present of that utterance is allowed to enclose the past. Conversely, the falseness of the world in which Wyatt has been thrown, the exile from her, from his former self, from even his sense of who he is, is profoundly an exile from the language with which he must live his public life, but that public enclosure of language from which the poem is made harbors, in the shape Wyatt gives it, the private self, between past and present, between scorn and desire, between hope and despair, between truth and falsity, compromised by and compromising with the world in which he lives. Something has been set right, some truth recovered from the rubble— but just enough for the poem to find its uneasy closure.

As we’ve seen with “Is it Possible?”, without adhering to a strictly recognizable form, Wyatt produced a series of especially winnowed, sinewy, lean poems in which he speaks from an extreme of suffering, his power utterly dissolved and with it his selfhood. That absence of power is made to be felt as a consequence of a terrible power being directed against the poet—whether its source is a woman, a sovereign, or fortune, powerlessness in the poem’s speaker has been made to happen. Within these circumstances, the poem is not only a refuge: it is a final affirmation of the will, the constitution of the poem also the constitution of the self, a regaining of its autonomy within the limited boundaries emblematized by the narrow lines on the page:

What death is worse than this,

When my delight,

My weal, my joy, my bliss,

Is from my sight?

Both day and night

My life alas I miss.

For though I seem alive,

My heart is hence:

Thus bootless for to strive

Out of my presence

Of my defence

Toward my death I drive.

Heartless alas what man

May long endure?

Alas, how live I then?

Since no recure

May be assure,

My life I may well ban.

Thus doth my torment grow

In deadly dread.

Alas, who might live so,

Alive as dead?

Alive to lead

A deadly life in woe?

It would be fatuous to claim “My weal, my joy, my bliss” is Henry or a position at court. We might read these as referring to a woman, or else to the states of being in themselves. But look more closely at the three terms and see how they move: “weal” is tinctured by “common weal,” “joy” and “bliss” suggest religious fulfillment, but “bliss” might perhaps also be sexual and emotional. They cannot squarely be attached to any object. What matters in the poem is the distance that is felt, and when the first stanza closes with “my life alas I miss,” the meaning of “life” opens out into the broadest sense of existence, its roots in pleasure and health, as well as “my station” and “my former surroundings.” It is a profound ache of longing. “Alas,” conventional in Wyatt’s era, is nowadays a mannerism—somehow though it feels fresh and authentic here, the opposite of a performance, more muttered in grim irony to himself than cried to any audience; that is because Wyatt can only barely become his own audience here. He is just barely his own public. When the word returns later (“Heartless alas what man | May long endure? | Alas, how live I then”) the word feels, to my ears, more self-aware, the poet knowing himself to be an audience—but it is curious nonetheless because it is repeated so closely within three lines. It is a word that dramatizes a sigh. That effect is compounded by its proximity to “Heartless,” which, whatever the particular Tudor pronunciation, would bleed its “ess” into “alas,” a lingering heartless-ness. But the word “heartless” is a clue: he does not have the heart to sigh over his own conditions. His heart is “hence,” wherever that may be—somewhere in the bank of fog in which power moves, somewhere in the sea that has receded from his shores. 

“Toward my death I drive” manages at once to both express the failure of his will to live and to affirm his capacity to will and act: he is not driven. He determines his own course. So when we come to “Heartless alas,” “alas” is absorbed into “heartless,” and the two words together are hollowed out of “heart,” spoken neither in despair nor even sorrow, but in a cold self-diagnosis. It is surprising, in fact, that he continues speaking at all; why write the poem, or why continue it? But the poem, like Wyatt, endures, carried by its own momentum, and the word “alas,” repeated twice in these three lines, is part of that momentum, as if he is compensating for the lack of a heart by a habit of language, filling the line, forcing himself onwards. Eventually, of course, he does bring the poem somewhere that acts as an end: it has achieved something. The final stanza, “Thus doth my torment grow” takes, with the word “thus,” a stride back away from what has been written: it is an extraordinary exertion of self-awareness, stepping up to assess his state. It ends in two questions to which the answer would seem to be “me,” the poet, but which are significant in not definitively meriting that answer. It could be that the poet “might” not live so; the answer could be “not me.” There is despair in the possibility that the answer might be either “me” or “not me.” On this reading, the “Alas” before “who might live so” is the deepest sigh of the poem, like a final breath, dwindling into the silence that follows the question. 

But in so far as “Alas” introduces the questions, and those questions turn to look beyond the poem, to an audience, it represents something active and alive: a turning towards an audience, holding out, if not hope, then the chance, that someone might be there to respond, that he is not as alone as he says. We could go further still. Without wanting to trust excessively in my sense of Wyatt’s verb modes, “might” strikes me as interesting in so far as it is not “must.” “Might” collects into it both the sense of bad fortune—what happens to have happened to force him, of all people, to live this way—but also the sense of it being something that can happen for him, though it could not for others. Within that “might” there lurks a “must,” but the “must” of endurance in the verb “might” is similar to the active “Toward death I drive” or (a line I’ve not mentioned) “My life I may well ban,” both suggesting that there is strength in autonomously act[JS9] ing in accordance with what is a cruel fate. The affirmative “might” gives another orientation to “Alas”: that of acceptance of his condition, not resigned, but willing to persevere in it, despite it, for the strength it shows he can summon.

Even a faint acquaintance with Wyatt’s life and times makes it persuasive to talk about his poems in light of his biographical circumstances, even when we don’t know the details. But it is the poems themselves that make it possible and persuasive to appeal to political personhood when discussing them, so that to speak of the person who fashioned the poems is really another way of speaking about the poems that actively fashion their own selfhoods.

In a poem, new meanings are released from what we take for granted; something answers more, and answers otherwise, than we might have expected (or than we might have been led to expect; it might answer our deepest intuitions that we’ve suppressed). The promise of language is revealed by what is imagined, even as the potential of the imagination—to reconcile conflicting ideals, to balance opposing judgments, to apprehend the possible within the actual—is made good by the inner workings of the poem. 

We might say the same of any work of art. As it takes external and explicit form out of the tacit imagination of individuals and societies, it gains something akin to self-consciousness. This is what is meant by the autonomy of art: not that art stands apart from history or politics, but that a work of art expresses the reasons why it is one way rather than another, containing within the judgment of its design the conditions of those judgments.[ii]

We can personify a work of art because art argues for its sharing properties of personhood. In so far as it succeeds as a work of art, we are persuaded not only that it can say something but that it has something worth saying (but maybe, being art rather than a person, it cannot do the former without the latter). We are persuaded of its rightness by its rightness. 

True poetry, T.S. Eliot wrote in an essay on Dante, communicates before it is understood. He maybe meant this: that a poem, by the virtues of its design, can inspire us to recognize it as a person with the capacity for virtues even before we know what those are. To read critically is to challenge the art to meet us with its sense of how the world not only can but, from whatever vantage point it claims for itself, should be imagined—and to challenge us to recognize how much the imagination can accomplish. We might fail art as much as it fails us, just as we might fail another person by our inability to recognize their virtues or, what is worse, our inability to recognize them as capable of possessing virtues (the ground of dignity). 

Central to self-consciousness is an awareness of itself as a thing: sensuous, immanent, present to and for others. It knows itself to be in the shared space of the world; to know itself to be right, it needs to know itself to stand in a world of shared meanings and shared judgments. Just as a person must balance knowing herself and knowing herself to be knowable by others, so too a work of art. In this way, person and poem may be moved to consider themselves not only as present before others but as somehow “public,” perhaps going further to then consider themselves “political.”

Literature, because the medium of language is always already subject to the pressures of public and political life, imagines its own publicness more readily—perhaps even inescapably— than other forms of art. This creates several burdens. On some occasions, privacy may be hard won within the public arena of warring words. From another perspective, the public and potentially political significance of language (in general and in specific words) can preempt the imagination at work in a poem or novel; any set of words could already be involved in the social imagination in a way that might imperil or undermine whatever it is a poem or novel is trying to do. In this case, the literature might need to wrest imaginative control back from its medium. A work of literature’s self-consciousness leads it to recognize its inadequate grasp over the means of self-consciousness, the utterance that is its being. 

This, arguably, is a theological or perhaps existential condition of selfhood that a poem might embody: the sense that we know ourselves to be someone who falters and groans under the means of self-knowledge. In the instant of reflecting on myself, I lose myself to words that are alien from my being; “I” becomes other. But this condition can be no less political for being existential and theological. In such (admittedly rare) cases, damnation and existential despair find an equivalent in the consciousness of the loss of political personhood—one that strikes deeper than absence of power, to the roots of desire, since such an alienation is possible only where political power is so absolute as to penetrate the sources of personhood.