As in Blake, the periphery and the center become interchangeable. The emotional power of the poem comes from this imaginative leap, a leap that would have been impossible without the detachment, the peripheral vision, as it were, of the narrator. This dialectic progression forms the basis for what we call Romantic melancholy as further defined by Keats; as he lies in his hammock in “Ode to a Nightingale,” he imaginatively follows the bird over several ridges, ranging farther and farther towards a periphery, until he has formed a new center beyond space and time, in a realm where it is uncertain whether he even wakes or sleeps. And we might note that Keats, too, lived the life of an outsider, making the stance in his poems more natural, for he was cut off by his deadly disease, by the reviewers who savaged him mercilessly, and even geographically by his trip to Rome in a useless attempt to regain his health.

The point is not simply that the Romantics considered themselves outsiders, though they did… and the point is not that they found ways to transform the peripheral into the central… The point is that these two things are true of the best poetry in any age.

The point is not simply that the Romantics considered themselves outsiders, though they did, and some, especially Shelley and Byron, had the reputations of being moral and political degenerates who were ostracized by the poetic power structures of their day, though Byron enjoyed immense popularity; and the point is not that they found ways to transform the peripheral into the central, though they did, often by discovering the sublime and the transcendental in the everyday and the commonplace as Wordsworth does in talking about a pile of stones or the fall of an acorn. The point is that these two things are true of the best poetry in any age. Take, for example, Wyatt’s stance in his great satire, “Myn owne John Poynz” (#196). Wyatt is writing to his friend about leaving the Spanish court. Wyatt, we must remember, was nearly always in trouble at court, at least from the time he revealed having an affair with one of King Henry the VIII’s future wives, and was jailed several times. Though he was not hung like his contemporary, Surrey, and enjoyed some important political offices, his position at court was always on the margin. To his credit, he had an honest appraisal of it, and as we see in this poem, he was trying to escape “the presse of courtes wher soo they goo.”

Wyatt’s strategy is not the gradual dialectic of the Romantics, but a more direct satire meant to clear a space from which a new center can be built. The poem is structured basically by a series of negatives and denials, by mentioning what he won’t do or say at court: “I cannot frame me tune to fayne, / To cloke the trothe for praisse withowt desart, / Of them that lyst all vice for to retayne.” It is a stance, then, taken at the periphery, and a stance taken at some considerable cost because he cannot “holld my pece of them allthoo I smart.” At one point, in rather famous lines, he refers to his own poetry, considered a bit rough in relation to other poetry of the day, and really only recently fully appreciated, for he writes by his own metrical formulas:

The poem continues with its indictment of every aspect of the pandering court life and climaxes in one of the great lines of denial in English poetry: “I cannot, I, No, no, it will not be.” However, once he has established his independent position on the periphery, away from the center of court life, he can then embrace his friend, Poynz, from a newly imagined center which ends the poem:

Two centuries later, Alexander Pope, a 4’11” hunchback in an age of surface beauty, a Catholic in the middle of Protestant England, a recluse who spent most of his time in his grot he had artificially decorated with colored stones and glass, would enhance Wyatt’s satiric strain. Pope begins his “Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot” by begging his servant to shut the doors against the panderers and influence peddlers of poets so common in his day:

This act of closing himself off from the politics of poetry sets the stage for the long satire of the poetry and ethical values — two things he sees as interrelated — of the day. Pope obviously feels himself to be a target, as he says a little later in the poem: “Poor Cornus sees his frantic Wife elope, / And curses Wit, and Poetry and Pope.” The cost of his estrangement — he had, despite his reputation as a writer, some considerable difficulty among the publishers, and even more among the reviewers — is evident a third of the way through the poem. “Why did I write?” he asks: “The Muse but serv’d to ease some Friend, not Wife, / To help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” As he continues to criticize the “jealous,” the “scornful,” those who “Damn with faint praise,” he also continues to distance himself from their world: “I sought no homage from the Race that write: / I kept, like Asian Monarchs, from their sight.”