Silver poets of the sixteenth century

English poetry, after the splendid summer sun of Chaucer had set, entered early into a rather wintry phase, in which a stirring of folk poetry and Skelton's odd 'flytings and vituperations' were almost the only relief. There were poets, of course, who looked back at the splendour, but their study windows were not opened until the great spring morning of the early sixteenth century when England became a land of song. It was a welcome renewal -- of language, new fancies, new conceits -- a looking into the face of nature. New learning, new culture were abroad; freshness touched the sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Howard and Releigh as they penned and composed this excitingly new literary form. In this garden of a world, the poets turned to love as their theme and played upon it with virtuosity -- from lines of great artistry and verbal felicity to poems of deep and true feeling.