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Surrey's Five Elegies: Rhetoric, Structure, and the Poetry of Praise

The Earl of Surrey’s five “personal elegies” demonstrate his sophisticated use of traditional rhetorical patterns, specifically his manipulation of the two types of structure for epideictic praise, that focusing on the subject’s biography, or that delineating his virtues. His sonnet on Thomas Clere follows the first type, and the Excellent Epitaffe on Wyatt adheres closely to the second, but even in these pieces Surrey departs from convention when it suits his larger rhetorical and poetic purposes. Individual modifications are even more apparent in his three less public tributes. The two sonnets on Wyatt serve as sequels to the satiric ending of the Epitaffe, and “So crewell prison” extends personal grief over the death of the Earl of Richmond to the level of an ubi sunt lament for the passing of an age. The elegies illustrate, finally, that the successful manipulation of convention by a good Tudor poet is itself a kind of originality.