Hi all! I've tried, off and on over the last few months, to do a better job writing a little bit every day, so I can gain the practice of turning vague ideas into sentences and so my fingers will learn how to hit the letters, even when I'm not fully formed in what I have to say. I've been really bad, in writing my papers, about staring at the screen or wandering off because I couldn't write the perfect sentence, finally putting something down after an extended period of time, and then having eventually to go back and erase my hard-won compromise once I figured out what the paper was actually about.
Doing this is a sort of finger exercise for learning how to write unselfconsciously.
Today I want to think a little bit about Surrey and Chaucer. In my post for Jeff's class, I argued (1) that Surrey often explicitly constructs a third-party observer in his poems that occupies the stance of both the poet and the reader, using phrases like "I se" and "I know" to introduce his observations, (2) that Surrey seems to embed his poems in a narrative framework more frequently than Wyatt does, (3) that Surrey is prone to connecting clauses with indications of their place in sequence and causal chain, like "but"/"for," "when"/"then," "from"/"to," etc, and (4) that Surrey is also prone to using unsubordinated lists, which I interpret as perceptions of the sort of observer/narrator we see in (1).
All this amounts to a different relation to the persona than we see in Wyatt. In my early thought about this, I wanted to read Wyatt as rhetorical and Surrey as fundamentally narrative, but as I went back through the poems, I found that's not quite true. Surrey frequently has poems that issue forth as a presumed record of speech in an implied situation just like Wyatt's. The difference, it seems to me now, is that where Wyatt's persona is one of an artificial remove--undoubtedly in itself strategic--Surrey includes that posture as part of the artifice. Surrey, to some extent, until we get to the late poems, is more at home with the artifice of court, while Wyatt gains much of his force from arguing for a misfit. Some of this, I'm sure, is a difference of rank: Surrey's status as an earl means both that he's more familiar with the world of the court and that he's more free to operate within it.
Some of this, too, is more related to a larger general problem with Surrey. His poetry is very much about conventions and artifice, but not as things to be resisted but as things to be lived through. This makes it difficult for me, brought up on New Historicism, to read politically, because I cannot look for fissures; I'm stuck looking for complicity.
I just realized that I haven't talked much about Chaucer. Chaucer is clearly important for Surrey--particularly The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Cresseid, and The Knight's Tale. I don't really have a good sense of why, besides perhaps his interest in the moods of epic. Surrey isn't really a lyric poet, exactly, for this reason. Perhaps: where the later Elizabethans are interested in the fictitiousness of epic and romance--its availability as a site for imaginative resolution of the problems of court-- Surrey is interested at times in epic/Chaucerian ability to situate the lyric speaker in a political world that is nevertheless only background for his actions. This whole paragraph is a muddle--I don't really know how to get at what I'm trying to say. Heck. I don't know what I'm trying to say. But that's what makes this a useful exercise...
