5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extraordinary view of the life of a noble Tudor poet., 22 Sep 1999
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Hardcover)
The Earl of Surrey was the co-founder, along with Sir Thomas Wyatt, of modern English poetry; the whole procession from Spenser and Shakespeare down to Yeats and Eliot starts with Surrey and Wyatt. Surrey's most notable contributions were the creation of English blank verse and the development of the English sonnet from Italian models; without Surrey we should not have Shakespeare as we know him. Surrey was also a distinguished soldier and a loving husband, who was executed for treason at age twenty-nine.
The nineteenth century produced two excellent lives of Surrey, those of G. F. Nott and Edmond Bapst, the latter in French. The twentieth century had not done so well, as the principal accomplishment of Surrey's 1938 biographer, Edwin Casady, was translating Bapst's discoveries into English. William Sessions swings the balance the other way, his Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey being a magnificent tour of Surrey's life, his poetry, and his world.
Sessions offers the first fully integrated biography of Surrey, addressing his art, family, society, culture, religion, travels, and military career. The book is based on a massive amount of research, both archival and geographical, for Sessions visited virtually every site of importance in Surrey's life. The illustrations alone, some never published before or not properly identified, almost justify the cost of the book.
Sessions corrects many key facts of Surrey's unevenly documented career. He shows, for example, that Surrey was a moderate Protestant, whereas Nott, Bapst, and Casady simply assume that Surrey shared their own religious views--an approach complicated by the fact that Nott was a Protestant while the other two were Catholics. Getting Surrey's religion straight is absolutely essential to understanding a short life spent at the center of the escalating violence of the early Reformation. Finally, Sessions uses the full texts of the original documents concerning Surrey's downfall (instead of reading the published summaries), thereby untangling much of the mystery that occurred amid the religious strife, dynastic uncertainty, and naked ambition at the end of the reign of Henry VIII.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding work by famous scholar, 24 Mar 2004
By "behenryv" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Hardcover)
I had the privilege of being Dr. William A. Sessions' research assistant at Georgia State University, and I have never seen, before or since, a work of such outstanding scholarly research written in his unique style of combining scholarship with human insight -- making this work accessible to all, and extremely useful to the academic community. It is a fascinating story, well told--possibly the first academic "page-turner." This important biography is written with such insight and so compellingly one cannot put it down. It is an extraordinary work by a brilliant scholar who is also a marvelous writer.