wiat's

Updated: July 10, 2026

There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and canzoni of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the Aeneid.

Henry A. (Henry Augustin) Beers - From Chaucer to Tennyson

The most genuine utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor a cage where so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece of eight lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his amatory affectations. Nevertheless the writers in Tottel's Miscellany were real reformers of English poetry.

Henry A. (Henry Augustin) Beers - From Chaucer to Tennyson