Week 2 - Wyatt, Surrey, and More

While I read the works of Wyatt and Surrey, I found myself thinking about how ironic it is that their words should live on and not those of the less privileged and illiterate, some of whom I am sure were of much more substance. I do not downplay the prettiness of their verses; certainly they could ribbon their tongues around a thought or two. But I scanned some of their poetry with a bit of an eye roll because, like everyone in class seemed to agree, they did a lot of moaning and weeping. I cannot say that spending time in jail should birth lines about the lovely filth of the cells or the astounding intellectual company of rats, but really, if that was the worst life had to offer for those men then I would rather hear of the best. Of course "So cruel prison how could betide" also mentioned the death of his boyhood friend, but the whole thing really just seemed like a party of verse where Surrey was just trying to gather his most depressing friends for a game of sulking.

As for More, reading "Utopia" encourages me to pick up a biography of the man. I raised the question yesterday of how the work did not seem to line up with what little I know of his life, and I should really like to know more of what drove him to compose it. Certainly many authors are not devoutly in line with all of the things they write, particularly in their fiction (as a working utopian society with real human beings is quite the wild fantasy!), but I would like to separate some pieces of the work that More believed in from those that he made up for whatever reason. Then of course I would like to know those latter reasons, or if that is not possible, at least know more details of his life that would lead me to some conclusions, be they truth or otherwise. I think I will at least spend a fragment of this weekend scraping the internet for information on him.