Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Thomas Wyatt (born around 1503, died 1542) was an English courtier, diplomat and poet whose translations and imitations of the Italian poet Petrarch introduced the sonnet form into English poetry for the first time. Serving Henry VIII as ambassador to the court of Emperor Charles V and surviving two spells of imprisonment in the Tower of London, once amid suspicion linked to Anne Boleyn's fall in 1536, Wyatt circulated his poems only in manuscript during his lifetime. His English versions of Petrarch's sonnets kept the Italian octave-and-sestet structure, but the looser rhyme patterns and rougher metrical texture of his verse gave later English poets, including Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a foundation to adapt and refine. Wyatt's poems reached print only after his death, collected alongside Surrey's in Richard Tottel's 1557 anthology Songes and Sonettes, generally known as Tottel's Miscellany, the first printed anthology of English poetry.