No More Learning

It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce
a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's
poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative
worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beauties _sui generis_,
incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by
an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite
work--poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung
together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty
sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl;
and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually
think of it--to show how many are the strands which run through it,
and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line
and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are
seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all
compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting
quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.




[Footnote 1: _History of English Poetry_, iii. 154. Mr.
Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next
page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was
perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think,
insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's
love-poetry. ]

[Footnote 2: Gaspary: _History of Italian Literature_
(Oelsner's translation), 1904. Consult also Karl Vossler:
_Die philosophischen Grundlagen des 'sussen neuen Stils'_,
Heidelberg, 1904, and _La Poesia giovanile &c. di Guido
Cavalcanti: Studi di Giulio Salvadori_, Roma, 1895. ]

[Footnote 3: Gaspary: _Op. Cit. _]


* * * * *




II

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.