Silver Poets of the 16th Century

English poetry, after the splendid summer sun of Chaucer had set, entered early into a rather wintry phase, in which a stirring of bulk poetry and Skelton’s odd ‘rhyming and vituperations’ were almost the only relief. The great Elizabethans were still to come with their splendour, but their study windows were not opened until the great spring morning of the early sixteenth century when England became a land of song. It was a welcome renewal of language, new fancies, new conceits. While our culture were abroad, a new touched the sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Howard—. Raleigh as they pioneered and composed this exciting—of the literary form. In this garden of a world, the poets turned to love as their theme and inspiration, and proved themselves masters of artistry and verbal felicity to poems of deep and true feeling.