Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt”: A Burkean Account (review)

Though Donald Friedman is best known for the learning and critical intelligence he has brought to bear on seventeenth-century poetry, an essay on Wyatt has an appropriate place in a tribute to him. Forty years ago, he published a series of essays on Wyatt, which, as I look back on them, I can see were a model for what I try to do here. He sought to provide readings that were genuinely literary, as we understood the term in those days, and at the same time were more historically informed than much of the New Criticism on which we had been nurtured. The present essay, part of a larger project, seeks to reconceive the formalist analysis of Renaissance poems so as to acknowledge the force of deconstructive and New Historicist critiques of New Critical formalism. It will be seen that my way of working differs from what Donald, like the rest of us, did when we were young. Where he described the unity of Wyatt’s lyrics in terms of dramatic speakers who, he argued, were conceived as both entrapped in and critical of the courtly love culture of the Tudor court, I try to loosen our usual assumptions about the lyric first person and account for the coherence of “Whoso list to hunt” in other terms. But my purpose is very much what Donald’s was: to show how a lyric by Wyatt represents the mind of the poet as he deals with his historical and cultural situation.

My guide in this endeavor is Kenneth Burke, whose aesthetic “impurity,” in the eyes of his fellow modernists, is precisely what recommends him to us now. “Every poem is, in a sense, an ‘occasional’ poem,” he said in his first book; in the 1930s he called for a “sociological criticism of literature”; he espoused the principle that the critic should use everything there is to use, including biographical information.¹ At the same time, literary formalism was central to his thinking. As a critic, he looked for the unity and internal coherence of individual works; his fundamental principle was that man being the language-using animal, any utterance or verbal artifact should be analyzed as a separate phenomenon. My interest is in both these aspects of Burke – specifically the way interests in social situation, rhetorical purpose, and social context are compatible with a formalist account of individual poems.

I begin with a brief account of some of Burke’s ideas, which I will then bring to bear on Wyatt’s sonnet, “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.” In the title essay of The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke proposes that “critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose.” Moreover, “they are strategic answers, stylized answers.” Poems, on this view, are “strategies for the encompassing of situations.”² Burke reformulates these ideas in A Grammar of Motives (1945), the book which most fulfilled his ambition to write a systematic theory of human action. Burke calls this theory “dramatism.” Its basis is a “pentad” of terms derived from the drama: scene, act, agent, agency, purpose.³ For our purposes, the crucial change is that what had hitherto been called “situation” is now called “scene.” This shift enacts what makes Burke’s theories promising for the analyst of Tudor poetry: it formalizes context and circumstances (“situation”), so as to suggest that as a representation (“scene”) they are encompassed by a piece of writing. At the same time, we will find it fruitful to retain a sense of the ambiguities of “situation” and not presume on the formalism of “scene.” In particular, the idea that a poem is a strategy for encompassing a situation helps us deal with what some accounts of Wyatt see as a contradiction between lyric poetry, as traditionally conceived, and poetry as the social product of life at court. These ideas certainly seem pertinent to Wyatt’s sonnet:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, helas, I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me...