Graven with Diamonds: Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Inventions of Love

A biography of Renaissance poet and courtier, Thomas Wyatt.

About the Author :
Nicola Shulman is a writer and reviewer for publications including the Sunday Telegraph, the TLS and Harpers and Queen. She lives with her family in London and in Yorkshire. She published A Rage for Rock Gardening, The story of Reginald Farrer, gardener, writer and plant collector with Short Books in 2002.

Review :
Masterly... the best work of history this year Beautifully intelligent and lucid... Shulman does a wonderful job of showing how Wyatt is one of those poets (one of the best types of poet) whose work conceals enormous complexity and strong countercurrents of thought and feeling underneath an apparently plain and transparent surface. Thomas Wyatt s poems are, for Nicola Shulman, like circuit boards: make the right connections and they light up; get it wrong and they lie inert. The Henrician court was a place where poems were actual physical objects which were passed around, just as lovers would give each other hearts. (The court comes alive in Shulman s account; a place full of blusterers and sycophants, of brilliant wits and gallants and of fulsome fools)... Shulman has a gift for detail and for vivid phraseology; The complexities of Henrician intrigue are laid out by Shulman in easily comprehensible fashion so that even a novice such as I can grasp them; and through it all stalks Wyatt, a man of deeper wit whose poems express such turbulence, though so carefully composed... Shulman argues convincingly in this erudite yet elegant study that Wyatt s poems are codes supremely artistic ways of expressing grievance, reproach, disappointment and unrequited desire. The people who received the physical object of the poem would know the keys to unlocking the texts; that is why to later generations (she says) the poems seem flat. Her analysis is graceful and intelligent, in particular a reading of Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind , which traces a hidden message about Anne Boleyn, and one where she shows how Wyatt s latinesque compression reveals another layer of meaning... This finely considered, silver-veined biography is a decorous and wise monument: now, as Shulman provides the right circuitry, his poems will spark up for us all. A brilliant example of literary rehabilitation...A narrative full of scheming courtiers, amorous women, slippery foreigners and a cruel but oddly earnest king who worshipped poetry...What is so compelling about Graven with Diamonds is not the just the story Nicola Shulman tells, but the way she tells it... The result is a thrilling book that manages to be both scholarly and wonderfully readable... ***** CS Lewis may have found Wyatt drab, but in Shulman's company he is utterly captivating. Graven with Diamonds revives the contexts and conversations that shaped, and were shaped by, the poetry... Inasmuch as is possible after almost half a millennium, Nicola Shulman has done a superb rewiring job. The poems glisten again, illuminating everything and everyone around them. It is a marvellous achievement and a lovely book. The great strength of Shulman's book lies in its incisive readings of Wyatt's verse and its likely motivations. She writes precisely, with original, sympathetic perceptions and an infectious relish for her subject... Shulman tells her tale with agreeable zest... This colourful book gives recognition of Wyatt's greatness a very welcome, vigorous push. One of the most persuasive and pleasurable accounts of English Renaissance poetry to appear... in years. Wyatt was not only a poet... he may have been the lover of Anne Boleyn, and also had a reputation as both an assassin and a spy. All of these disparate threads, with a lavish helping of his verse, are woven through Graven With Diamonds by Nicola Shulman, whose lyrical prose creatively matches that of her extraordinary subject. Sharp, dangerous and exhilarating... bursting with drama as well as being scholarly and full of surprises