The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem

By Peter Murphy, John Hawley Roberts Professor of English. Stanford University Press, August 2019. Thomas Wyatt didn’t publish “They Flee from Me.” It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells—in vivid and compelling detail—of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years.