"We take great poems to have survived history by virtue of their excellence. Peter Murphy shows how wrong we are. He tells a vivid, compelling story of one poem's survival across five centuries of reckless printers, contentious critics, warring editors, and devoted readers, and of all the good luck that's kept it alive."Jeff Dolven, Princeton University "Murphy turns the story of a single work into a moving, lyrical meditation on the vicissitudes of poetry as it enters the unpredictable worlds of readers, collectors, editors, and scholars. Beautifully attuned to what can and cannot be known about a poem's history, this book provides a model for understanding what it means for literature to endure."Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota "Beautifully written and utterly original, Peter Murphy's study of Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me' as it passes through the hands and minds of readers from the sixteenth century to the present is a profound meditation on how we remember and forget the past, on everything that makes us truly human."John Guillory, New York University "Peter Murphy's superb book takes Wyatt's perhaps most famous poem, "They flee from me,' and turns it into a parable of loss, rediscovery, and the fragility and chance of how the lyric poem's small proportions generate capacious meaning over time and vastly different cultural contexts. Murphy's work is admirable in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin....[ It] provides singular access to the 'vse of Poesie' as the original cause for what it means to be human."Daniel Fischlin, Renaissance and Reformation "Murphy's study and style are subtly and pleasurably convincing in their discussion of fine prosodic and stylistic distinctions....[ One] of the most interesting provocations in the English Renaissance this year."Ryan Netzley, Studies in English Literature
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