Stephen Greenblatt, from "Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt's Poetry," in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (The University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Stephen Greenblatt uses Thomas Wyatt's experience of the court of Henry VIII and, as an ambassador, of the courts of Europe, to focus on the brutal quest for domination which characterized the courtly politics of his time. Personal self-understanding and , in Greenblatt's term, "self-fashioning," was inseparable from the public and political life of a man of Wyatt's standing, and so was a part of his intimate experience as well. In his love poems, Wyatt reveals the complexity of a self-presentation which both strives to dominate his lover, while at the same time exposing and subverting that socially sanctioned drive to domination.

The skillful merger of manliness, realism, individuality, and inwardness succeeds in making Wyatt's poetry, at its best, distinctly more convincing, more deeply moving, than any written not only in his generation but in the preceding century. But his achievement is dialectical: if, through the logic of its development, courtly self-fashioning seizes upon inwardness to heighten its histrionic power, inwardness turns upon self-fashioning and exposes its underlying motives, its origins in aggression, bad faith, self-interest, and frustrated longing. Wyatt's poetry originates in a kind of diplomacy, but the ambassadorial expression is given greater and greater power until it intimates a perception of its own situation that subverts its official purpose. Wyatt's great lyrics are the expression of this dialectic; they give voice to competing models of self-presentation, one a manipulation of appearances to achieve a desired end, the other a rendering in language, an exposure, of that which is hidden within. The result is the complex response evoked by a poem like "They Flee from Me": on the one hand, acceptance of the speaker's claim to injured merit, admiration for his mastery of experience, complicity in his "manly" contempt for women's bestial faithlessness; on the other hand, recognition of the speaker's implication in his own betrayal, acknowledgement of the link between the other's imputed bad faith and his own, perception of an interior distance in the ideology so passionately espoused. We sense, in short, a continual conflict between diplomatic self-presentation, struggling to appropriate inwardness, and inwardness struggling to achieve critical independence from self-presentation.