Structural Failure

With Thomas Wyatt&s;s translations of Petrarch, we see him fastening onto his predecessor&s;s central strategy of failure and adapting it to his own particular concerns. In doing so he alters its fundamental nature. By moving the love contest out of the realm of the spiritual and rooting it firmly in the context of a purely secular striving, Wyatt effectively raises the stakes and alters the meaning of the poetic dynamic he embraces. In Petrarch, spiritual virtue is the primary goal, and the failure of love becomes a means to success. But in Wyatt&s;s version, spiritual aspiration is stripped from the equation, leaving behind the central reality of ongoing political anxiety. As he wrestles with the very earthly concerns of love and pride and politics, he transfers the nature of failure from the Petrarchan realms of aesthetic abstraction to the striving and back-biting of the royal court. As a courtier in the Henrician court his sense of himself was largely formed from an awareness of vulnerability, and in making use of Petrarchan failure, he transformed it from a source of ultimate success to a model of ongoing anxiety and a new basis for the construction of the literary self: I fail, therefore I am.