Chapter 1 - The Music of Fetters

Summary

Poetry and Bondage begins in the late sixteenth century, with a new reading of Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poems in the context of his multiple experiences of imprisonment and surveillance. Wyatt is often regarded as a key figure in the initiation of an ‘inward turn’ or lyric interiority, and of modern English lyric. While such readings are problematic, they tell us something about what we think lyric is. Wyatt’s poetry demonstrates the importance of prisons for developing English-language lyric habits of address, intimacy and conceptualisations of power and selfhood. The chapter focuses on the various nets, chains, clogs and fetters in Wyatt’s poems, in relation to the conditions of amorous and political servitude they depict. It discusses how that servitude is enacted and challenged through formal constraints, such as the rondeau or the sonnet. It relates Wyatt’s tropes of bondage to the depiction of human and animal life in his poems and to the akratic subject’s obedience and resistance to sovereignty. It includes close readings of two of his most famous poems, ‘They flee…’ and ‘Whoso list to hunt’.