He didn't write very much. He published nothing in his own lifetime. He is not very well known. But there is something about his poetry that gets under the skin.

Thomas Wyatt, above, was born at Allington Castle in Kent in 1503. Presented at court at the age of 13, he was an aristocrat and his life was not his own. At 17 he was married - appropriately, in terms of wealth and status - to Elizabeth Brooke. He was sent abroad on diplomatic missions to Italy and to France. In 1535 Wyatt was knighted. In 1536 he was arraigned alongside his friend, Anne Boleyn, and others in his close circle. Unlike them, he survived. Come 1540, and once again he survived the execution of his patron, Thomas Cromwell.

In making this new selection for Faber, Alice Oswald redefines Wyatt. He is known as “a love poet”. But he is really, she argues, “a fear poet - a poet of disquiet”. Oswald herself is well qualified to understand and interpret; she is not only a great poet herself, but also a great reader of poetry. She knows how to hear the peculiar music of a poet's voice.

Wyatt lived at a time when the medieval courtly order was giving way to something more personal, more recognisably modern. So Wyatt was a courtier, a diplomat, and a servant of the state. But he was also a man. At one time he loved Anne Boleyn. Later, he loved the Catholic Elizabeth Darrell, from whom he was forced to part. Wyatt based his (more or less private) poems on the sonnets of his medieval precursor, Petrarch. But he added his own interventions. In this way, he created astonishing and moving poems such as “Who so list to hounte I know where is an hynde”, or “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”. These are urgent, in-the-moment poems that have no equal in his time or in ours. Wyatt longed for a private life “withouten noise”. But, nonetheless, he deserves poetic celebrity now.

Sir Thomas Wyatt: poems selected by Alice Oswald
Faber, £5.99 Buy the book here

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Burning is too good for them
• Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik