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‘The Restful Place’

Addressing the apparent absence of vernacular literary criticism in early Tudor culture, this chapter argues that a nascent poetics lies within the period’s lyric poetry itself. The critical lexicon that laces this lyric poetry shows poets beginning to theorize literature in spatial, geometric, or formal terms. Recalling the place logic of Henrician pedagogy and the blurring of boundaries between poetic invention and critical judgement, the poetry of Wyatt, Surrey, and their early Tudor acolytes ventures a rudimentary theory of poetic composition as the constraining of memory into form. Responding to the Italian commentary tradition that locates Petrarch’s poems in allusive relation to other poems, early Tudor lyric gestures to an intertextual model of how to read texts in a network of remembered literary ‘places’. As imitation fuses into commentary, external places of criticism are constrained internally within Henrician poetry itself.