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Pedant Warning: this is seriously boring stuff -- hit the Delete Button NOW if such material offends you. I'll try to keep this brief, if not necessarily to the point, in response to remarks from Peter Riley below. My apologies to Peter if I end up misconstruing him, or saying what he already knows or has, indeed, said. > Donne's Songs and Sonnets -- what's the distinction? (but beware: > "Sonnet" doesn't mean little song, it derives from a diminutive of the Italian > for "sound") (but nevertheless clearly remains a lyric concept and Italian > sonnets were sung). > Beware the etymological fallacy. Scrutinising the relevant citations in the OED for this period demonstrates that the term sonet/sonnet as used at this time (middle 16thC-early 17thC) in English could refer to three things: 1. A fourteen line poem. 2. Any short poem. 3. A short and sonorous poem, possibly set to music. As it relates to Donne, well he obviously wrote lots of 14 line thingies, mostly religious, as well as other poems of varying degrees of lyricality. The habit of referring to (part of) his work as "the Songs and Son(n)ets of John Donne" derives not from the first (1633) posthumous edition of his work but from the second (1635) edition, where the poems are divided, among other categories, between "Songs and Sonets" [sic -- the section title probably echoes Tottel], "Epigrams", "Holy Sonnets" [sic],"Verse Epistles", etc. The point of this probably over-pedantic observation is that while Donne's poems do differ in nature one from the other, the taxonomic arrangement and the labeling of the various genres may not necessarily be his. > (On Wyatt see Denis Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court > (1961), index, which I'm sure you'll already know. > Naughty of Peter to bring up one side of a debate without at least a hat-tip to the opposing side. While Stevens makes some excellent points, the texts he refers to are unfortunately not by Wyatt. For which see H.A.Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period, and the edition by Joost Daalder. Briefly: Wyatt's lyric poems can be found in five places -- : the Egerton Manuscript (which, with some very few exceptions, contains all the lyric poetry which Wyatt ever wrote, revised and corrected by the Man Himself, and with some of the poems towards the end of the MS written in Wyatt's own hand). : the [earlier] Devonshire MS, which contains several Wyatt poems, some later revised, and at least one (but possibly only one) not in Egerton, interspersed among a further mass of highly-singable lyric poems not by Wyatt but which end up ascribed to him, mostly by Kenneth Muir. : the Arundel MS, partly based on Egerton but with some further material - well, one poem -- originally present in Egerton and now lost, and omitting much that's present in Egerton. : Tottel's Miscellany, which draws (in order of importance for the editor), on Arundel, Egerton, Devonshire, and at least one unidentified manuscript which, pace Tottel or Grimald or whoever edited Surrey and Wyatt's poems in 1557, appears to have had absolutely no identifiable connection with Wyatt and seems to have been, by all indications, Devonshire ultra-lite. Finally, there's the Blage Manuscript, where some poems by Wyatt not found elsewhere appear. Wyatt was exceedingly careful, for obvious reasons when you consider the political implications of the poem beginning, "The bell-tower showed me such a sight / As sticks in my head day and night," to restrict the circulation of the poems by him which it contains, and the manuscript itself only (re)surfaced in the late 1950s. [What did the speaker see? Anne Boleyn having her head chopped off. Where was he watching from? From a window of the Tower. Go figure ... ] In sum: whatever Stevens says in Music and Poetry, interesting as it is, isn't (necessarily) immediately applicable to Wyatt. Question: Did John Donne know Thomas Wyatt's work? Answer: Yes, and he had read them in the (misleadingly titled, frequently revised to smooth the rhythm, and heavily punctuated) versions of Wyatt's poems as found in Tottel's Miscellany. Question: Was Donne particularly influenced by Wyatt? Answer: No. Question: How do we know this? Answer: Read "The Message". "The Message" is entirely unlike anything else John Donne ever wrote, and I suspect that he wrote it just to show Ben Jonson, who alleged that for not keeping of the accent, he (Donne) would perish, that he could do The Wyatt Thing perfectly well if he wanted to, but had no intention of making a habit of it. At this point, I turned to google to make sure I remembered the first line of "The Message" correctly -- "Send home my long-strayed eyes to me" -- and discovered something I hadn't already known (here: http://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=44702). I pass it on, as it took me (pleasantly) aback. It turns out that this particular poem has been set at least four times, and that one of the settings is contemporary with the composition of the poem. At that point, I realised that I knew less about Donne than I thought I did, ... and ... Robin