"They flee from me, that sometime did me seek "..... stories of Sir Thomas Wyatt

I am looking forward to this week's edition of In Our Time which focus on Sir Thomas Wyatt.

That said this Radio 4 series has offered some excellent discussions recently of which the ones on Napoleon and Bertolt Brecht were informative and thought provoking.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, date unknown

And so I hope will be this one in which "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the greatest poet of his age', Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne. 

As an ambassador to Henry VIII and, allegedly, too close to Anne Boleyn, he experienced great privilege under intense scrutiny. Some of Wyatt's poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh and conversational and yet he wrote them under the tightest constraints, when a syllable out of place could have condemned him to the Tower.

With Brian Cummings,50th Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York, Susan Brigden, Retired Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, and Laura Ashe, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production"

Picture; Portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Black and coloured chalks, pen and ink on pink-primed paper, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

*Sir Thomas Wyatt, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001yxk8