THE TEXT AND CANON OF DONNE'S POEMS
TEXT
Both the text and the canon of Donne's poems present problems which have never been frankly faced by any of his editors—problems which, considering the greatness of his reputation in the seventeenth century, and the very considerable revival of his reputation which began with Coleridge and De Quincey and has advanced uninterruptedly since, are of a rather surprising character. An attempt to define and, as far as may be, to solve these problems will begin most simply with a brief account of the form in which Donne's poems have come down to us.
Three of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime—the Anniversaries (i.e. The Anatomy of the World with A Funerall Elegie and The Progresse of the Soule) in 1611 and 1612, with later editions in 1621 and 1625; the Elegie upon the untimely death of the incomparable Prince Henry, in Sylvester's Lachrymae Lachrymarum, 1613; and the lines prefixed to Coryats Crudities in 1611. We know nothing of any other poem by Donne being printed prior to 1633. It is noteworthy, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, that none of the Miscellanies which appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century, as Englands Parnassus[1] (1600), or at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Davison's Poetical Rhapsody,[2] contained poems by Donne. The first of these is a collection of witty and elegant passages from different authors on various general themes (Dissimulation, Faith, Learning, &c.) and is just the kind of book for which Donne's poems would have been made abundant use of at a somewhat later period. There are in our libraries manuscript collections of 'Donne's choicest conceits', and extracts long or short from his poems, dating from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.[3] The editor of the second of the anthologies mentioned, Francis Davison, became later much interested in Donne's poems. In notes which he made at some date after 1608, we find him inquiring for 'Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams etc., by John Don', and querying whether they might be obtained 'from Eleaz. Hodgson and Ben Johnson'. Among the books again which he has lent to his brother at a later date are 'John Duns Satyres'. This interest on the part of Davison in Donne's poems makes it seem to me very unlikely that if he had known them earlier he would not have included some of them in his Rhapsody, or that if he had done so he would not have told us. It has been the custom of late to assign to Donne the authorship of one charming lyric in the Rhapsody, 'Absence hear thou my protestation.' I hope to show elsewhere that this is the work, not of Donne, but of another young wit of the day, John Hoskins, whose few extant poems are a not uninteresting link between the manner of Sidney and the Elizabethans and of Donne and the 'Metaphysicals'.
The first collected edition of Donne's poems was issued in 1633, two years after his death. This is a small quarto, the title-page of which is here reproduced.