John donne in the nineteenth century

JOHN DONNE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY


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John Donne in the
Nineteenth Century

DAYTON HASKIN

1


1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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For Margaret, Thomas, Peter, and Helen

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Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Brief Notes to the Reader
Preface
1. Introduction: The Variorum as a Window onto Cultural History

viii
ix
x
xiii
1

2. Doctor Donne

15

3. A Thinker and a Writer

46

4. Letters

67

5. ‘Sensuous Things’

103

6. Donne in the Hands of Biographers

149

7. Donne at Harvard

196

8. A Subject Not Merely Academic

234

Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index of References to Donne’s Works
General Index

271
293
297
301


List of Illustrations
1. The Donne Cabinet, Lobby of the Houghton Library, Harvard University;
photograph by Justin Ide/Harvard News Office.

219

2. The Charles Eliot Norton Collection, with a bust of the collector, Gore Hall
Treasure Room, Harvard University, c.1908; photograph courtesy of the
Harvard University Archives, call number HUV 48 (3–8).

221


Abbreviations
DNB
ELH
JDJ
JEGP
MLQ
MP
N&Q
OED
PMLA
SEL
SP
UTQ

The Dictionary of National Biography
ELH: Journal of English Literary History
The John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
Modern Language Quarterly
Modern Philology
Notes and Queries
The Oxford English Dictionary

Publications of the Modern Language Association
Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
Studies in Philology
University of Toronto Quarterly


Brief Notes to the Reader
In the chapters that follow references to The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of
John Donne, gen. ed. Gary A. Stringer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1995– ), are generally given (within parentheses) in the text. In
making reference to individual volumes of the Variorum in the discursive
sections of the book and in reproducing the titles of the volumes in the
notes, because users of this tool are familiar with the practice of designating
them by Arabic numerals, I have in these places retained that form of
designation. However, page references, given in parentheses or in a footnote,
follow the usual style of designating volume number in lower-case Roman
numerals.
As a general rule, I place in italics the title of The Variorum Edition
whenever referring to something that has already been published. I use
the phrase the Variorum, or the Donne Variorum, without italics to refer
to the large collaborative project that Gary Stringer initiated in the 1980s.
In practice it has not always proved easy to distinguish clearly between
the two.
In making reference to Donne’s poems, I have ordinarily followed the
form and spelling of the titles as they appear in the master list printed in The Variorum Edition. Where accurate representation of another’s
treatment of a poem requires it, I have deviated from this practice. An
example is the elegy called in the Variorum ‘On his Mistress’ but known
to many readers under headings that propose that the poet’s wife or mistress had sought to accompany him ‘disguised as a page’. Sometimes in
citing the text of Donne’s poetry it has proved necessary to quote from the
particular edition with which a given reader or group of readers was working. In writing about Coleridge’s marginalia on Donne’s Third Satire, for

instance, I quote from the 1669 edition, into a copy of which he wrote his
commentary.
Quotations of materials published before the twentieth century generally come from the earliest printed version of a book or article. When it is
pertinent to quote a different version, I do so. For instance, in citing Izaak
Walton’s Life of Donne, I usually cite the edition of 1675 because it was the
final edition on which Walton himself worked. At relevant moments I cite the
edition published by Thomas Zouch (1796), however, since Zouch mediated
the 1675 edition to many nineteenth-century readers. In working with critical
and biographical materials, I have consistently attempted to compare earlier


Brief Notes to the Reader

xi

and later versions of books and articles that have been reprinted, in order
to find whether any notable change was made. Where I have found a significant
alteration, as with David Masson’s discussion of Donne in his biography of
Milton, I have attempted to discover the grounds for revision and to gauge,
insofar as it is possible, the impact of the change.


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Preface
It is one of the illusions of our age that Donne was invented by Mr. Eliot.
—G. M. Young, in the London Mercury (1936)

One September evening, walking out of the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard

where the British actor Alec McCowen had just given a one-man show, I
overheard a fellow theatre-goer confide to his companions, ‘I never knew
Donne was a preacher!’ He was not so much confessing ignorance. He was
expressing astonishment and delight and, I take it, gratitude for a segment of
the program during which we had been treated to cuttings from John Donne’s
sermons. I have felt a kindred gratitude to him, whoever he was, for having
helped to set me on a path that led to writing this book.
Hearing the pleasure and surprise in the voice of that anonymous patron
of the theatre raised for me one of three foundational questions that have
contributed a good deal to my conception of this project. By way of introducing
the first, I should explain that I had seen McCowen in other productions. These
included a spirited creation of the libertine Lucio in Measure for Measure, a
solo recitation of the complete Gospel according to St Mark, and a haunting
performance as the probing psychiatrist in one of the earliest productions
of Equus. At the Loeb that evening McCowen was performing a personal
tribute to popular theatrical entertainment. He called it Shakespeare, Cole
and Company. His material comprised a dazzling array of favorite passages,
most of them drawn from the Bard, some from more recent work, including
that of Cole Porter. He held everything and brought everyone together by
weaving in genial commentary. Here he gave a bit of explanation about how
a certain scene works. There he offered some self-effacing personal history
about how he had stumbled into an inspired interpretation of a classic role.
As the evening wore on and the actor was able to count on increased intimacy
with the audience, he set the stage to recite a passage from a sermon preached
in a time of plague. He framed his selection by acknowledging that, with the
spread of HIV, many of us have lost persons we have held dear. He added
that the AIDS virus has struck a number of persons who have given their lives
to the theatre. Whatever autobiographical implications his observations may
have entailed were not spelled out.

xiv

Preface

That members of the audience should have been talking animatedly about
the sermon just after the show seemed fitting at the time, as it does now in
memory. Both the cutting and Donne himself came as a surprise. There had
been nothing in the printed program, nor in the actor’s previous remarks, that
predicted a dramatic ascent into the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral—or that
intimated that there was to be a serious departure from light entertainment.
McCowen introduced the materials poignantly, and Donne’s remarks sounded
an intimate resonance as the lines between the actor and the preacher
disappeared. In putting together the script, McCowen had been able to count
on there being members of the audience who would know Donne as a love
poet. This helped to make the passage from the sermon challenging in just the
right ways, and provided an emotional climax. The preacher that McCowen
created, who acknowledged his auditors’ fears of the plague and at the same
time showed himself intent on speaking words of consolation, might just have
been someone who had experimented freely with sex and then been required,
by a dire turn of events, to take a more discreet public stance. He seemed still
to have, as Lucio says of the Duke in Measure for Measure, ‘some feeling for
the sport.’
The question raised for me by the theatre-goer’s spontaneous declaration
depended, as these things do, on some peculiarities of my own angle of
vision. For some time, I had been making descents into the book-stacks in
Harvard’s Widener Library, trying to learn what nineteenth-century readers
had seen—and not seen—in early modern poetry. In particular I had been
paying attention to the love lyrics of a writer whom A. S. Byatt would make
into a Galeotto in her novel, Possession, where Donne’s poetry facilitates

the coming together of two Victorian poets whose brief idyllic love affair
becomes the object of intense postmodernist sleuthing. I already understood
dimly that something like a textual erotics was at work in the Victorians’
reading of Donne. I had been intrigued by the fact that poetic lines about how
love makes one little room an everywhere and about forgetting the He and
She are implemented in Middlemarch as chapter-mottoes. What caught my
imagination in the remark ‘I never knew that Donne was a preacher’ depended
upon my awareness that George Eliot identified the author of those passages
as Doctor Donne. That is, she took it for granted that her contemporaries
knew him as a character in the book that was regarded as the masterpiece
of English biography: ‘A preacher in earnest, weeping sometimes for his
auditory, sometimes with them’, as Izaak Walton told them in his charming
story about the former Dean of St Paul’s, ‘always preaching to himself like
an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St Paul was, to heaven
in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend
their lives: Here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practiced it,


Preface

xv

and a virtue so as to make it be beloved even by those that loved it not.’¹ The
note of surprise in ‘I never knew Donne was a preacher!’ had become possible
because few people read Walton any longer. By a radical change in the cultural
frameworks in which Donne is lodged, the writer of passionate poetry now
has a decided priority over the subject of Walton’s hagiographical narrative.
That transformation is the subject of this book.
When McCowen gave his performance, I already had to hand an unprecedented body of material in which I could begin to explore questions about
when and how this reversal in Donne’s identity had taken place. A few years

earlier I had accepted an invitation to work on the project that would create
The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. The large goals of this
variorum are principally two: to produce a new text of Donne’s poems, based
on careful scrutiny of all the major editions and all the seventeenth-century
manuscripts, and to provide a comprehensive history of the commentary on
all of Donne’s poems. To me were allocated the twin tasks of creating a record
of how each of fifty-four lyrics was interpreted between 1800 and 1900 and
of composing a history of the interpretation of the Songs and Sonnets during
the period. Finding all the books and articles in which Donne’s poetry had
been discussed for a hundred years was a challenging task; scholarship on
the nineteenth-century revival turned out to be spotty, and often it proved
misleading.² Fortunately, a previously obscure dissertation on the history of
Donne’s reputation written at the University of Uppsala proved a bibliographical godsend for the period from 1779 to 1873. Working primarily at
Harvard, and also at Yale’s Sterling Library and at the British Library, I scoured
hundreds of old books and periodicals to augment the bibliography that I
had culled out of earlier studies. In addition to 350 or so items about Donne
previously listed in Raoul Granqvist’s industrious dissertation and elsewhere,
I turned up more than 150 new items.
Twenty years on it seems remarkable that as recently as the 1980s one
could have easy access to Widener’s extensive holdings from the nineteenth
century. The sort of work that I was doing then—making my way row by
row through subterranean book-stacks, pulling down old tomes from shelf
after shelf, looking through hundreds of volumes to see whether this or that
¹ Izaak Walton’s Lives of Dr. John Donne, etc., is quoted here from the edition by Thomas
Zouch (York, 1796); most nineteenth-century editions of Walton’s Lives were based on Zouch.
² At the time when the Variorum project began, the principal bibliographical resources for
the study of Donne’s place in nineteenth-century literary history were as follows: Geoffrey
Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, Dean of Saint Paul’s, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon,
1973); A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1975); and Raoul Granqvist’s Uppsala dissertation, published as The Reputation of John Donne,

1779–1873 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1975).


xvi

Preface

one contained some reference to Donne—can no longer be carried out.
Lest this sound like pure nostalgia, I must acknowledge that much of this
scouring before we had electronic search engines was not only drudgery but
literally dirty work. Most of it was undertaken in the summer time, and the
library had no air-conditioning. The books were dusty. Many were crumbling.
Occasionally the bindings had come apart. Tiny corners of pages, some of
them folded down perhaps by readers a hundred years previously, kept falling
out, leaving a random trail of scraps. If there were a cadre of secret Library
Police, I thought to myself, they would have little trouble tracking me down.
Someone might tell me to stop handling so many old books.
In the event, still more drastic measures were taken. They were executed
impersonally, with no direct embarrassment for anyone. Even before major
renovations commenced at Widener in the 1990s, the library accelerated the
removal of thousands of old books into storage off-site. No one can browse
any longer as I once did, when in, say, two hours’ time you could make a
preliminary examination of dozens of artifacts and note down whether the
contents of each of these items was ‘pertinent’ or ‘not pertinent’ to the history
of reading Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. Of course theoretically all the books are
still available. If you know in advance just what to look for, you can access the
relevant title through an electronic database and order it up. Say you’ve noticed
that in 1819 an editor named Ezekiel Sanford published out of Philadelphia
a series of Works of the British Poets. Although the database does not tell you
which poets are included, you can summon from the Depository (one by

one) all twenty-five volumes. The next day, once you charge out each volume
individually for use within the library, it is possible to look through them
all until you find whether your poet is included. It is completely impractical,
however, to perform this operation for thousands of books and periodicals.
And forget about serendipitous discoveries from desultory browsing.
By the time I began the next phase of my research, when I systematically
examined every known published reference to Donne that I had found, the
mass of materials had grown so large that more often than not I felt relieved
(and a bit guilty for that) when an item could be dismissed as ‘not pertinent.’
Having clear criteria that allowed me to ignore large amounts of material, I
made photocopies of the writings that were directly pertinent to the Songs
and Sonnets. During a sabbatical leave I annotated each article and book in
which there was any discussion of Donne’s love poetry. On the basis of my
annotations, I composed a history of how each of the Songs and Sonnets had
been interpreted. Later I reread my photocopies in chronological order and
wrote a general history of Donne’s love poetry in the period. The results are
to become available whenever the relevant parts of the Variorum are at last


Preface

xvii

published. (At the time I am writing, three and a half of the projected eight
volumes have appeared in print.³)
This work for the Variorum project began in a general climate of literary
studies when deconstructionist and new historicist critics were calling attention
to what had been deferred, repressed, and made invisible during the period
when a New Critical approach to Donne had been favored. As I started
taking an interest in questions about how ‘Donne’ had come popularly to

denominate a poet rather than a preacher, contemporary critical perspectives
offered hope that I could discern questions that had gone unasked or that
remained unexplored. It became evident that the procedures that had enabled
me to ignore masses of published evidence were tied to assumptions that could
not account for the most conspicuous material finding that my research had
turned up: that something like three-quarters of the pages I had photocopied
had been published between 1890 and 1900. I was going to have to re-examine
many items that I had dismissed as ‘not pertinent.’ Once my research took
this decisive turn towards exploring nineteenth-century literary culture, with
increasing frequency I began to seek out three kinds of materials that I had
hitherto tried to ignore: Donne’s prose, nineteenth-century editions of his
writings, and biographical narratives. As my project came more and more to
differ in scope and in perspective from the Variorum, it also began to differ
from previous accounts of the Donne revival. These accounts evinced three
principal limitations: (1) they tended to treat the poetry in isolation from
the prose and the biography; (2) they broke off in the early 1870s, leaving
unexamined the period when writing about Donne intensified; and (3) they
told the story of Donne’s recovery as if his emergence as a major poet had
been inevitable.⁴
³ The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, gen. ed. Gary A. Stringer (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995– ); Vol. 6: The Anniversaries and the Epicedes and Obsequies
(1995); Vol. 8: The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems
(1995); Vol. 2: The Elegies (2000); Vol. 7, Part 1: The Holy Sonnets (2005).
⁴ See Kathleen Tillotson, ‘Donne’s Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (1800–1872)’, in
Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of His Seventieth
Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 307–26; Roger Sharrock, ‘Wit, Passion and Ideal Love:
Reflections on the Cycle of Donne’s Reputation’, in Peter Amadeus Fiore (ed.), Just So Much
Honor: Essays Commemorating the Four-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1972), 33–56; cf. Smith (ed.), Critical
Heritage (1975). A second volume of John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. J. Smith and

Catherine Phillips (London: Routledge, 1996), purports to cover the period from 1873 to 1923.
Helpful exceptions to the general cutting short of accounts of the Donne Revival include
Roland B. Botting, ‘The Reputation of John Donne during the Nineteenth Century’, Research
Studies of the State College of Washington, 9 (1941), 139–88, and Joseph Duncan, The Revival
of Metaphysical Poetry, The History of a Style, 1800 to the Present (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1959).


xviii

Preface

Another aspect of the climate of literary and cultural studies in the late
twentieth century provided just the right sort of challenge: Donne’s stock
was on the decline, and it was no longer possible to write as if his aesthetic
greatness had been bound to reassert itself at last. One need not fully embrace
the apocalyptic premise of Wallace Shawn’s play, The Designated Mourner,
according to which everyone on earth who could read John Donne’s poetry
is now dead, to see that the circuitous history of reading Donne cannot be
exhausted in a triumphal narrative meant to demonstrate the superiority of a
modernist sensibility.⁵ The cult that emerged in the 1920s has long since spent
itself and given way to productive and unproductive kinds of skepticism about
the value of reading Donne. In order to appreciate the historical contingencies
by which Donne came to be regarded as a major author, it is helpful to adopt
a provisional agnosticism in the face of truth-claims about his greatness, even
though privately (as it were) one regards many features of his writing as
remarkable. The history of contingencies that I have to recount shows clearly
enough that readers have repeatedly placed unnecessary and undesirable limits
on how Donne’s work can be understood.
Reading Possession provoked a second foundational question. My attempts

to learn what ‘Donne’ had meant to various readers—and writers—had
showed me that for most of the nineteenth century his name referred to
a biographical subject whose poetry was only incidental to his enduring
significance. Donne, as he appears in Byatt’s book, belongs to twentiethcentury literature teachers and to fictional nineteenth-century poets, not (as
the record in Victorian publications has it) to readers interested in his marriage
and concerned about a Jacobean preacher’s place in English history. In the
Victorian plot of Possession Donne’s love poems are central to the dynamics
of the relationships between its male protagonist, Randolph Henry Ash, and
the two principal women in his life, his spouse, Ellen, and his lover, Christabel
Lamotte. The latter parts of the narrative reveal that in 1889, during the
weeks before he passed away, Ash was obsessed with Donne’s poems and
quoted them ‘to the ceiling.’ He took a particular interest in ‘A Valediction
Forbidding Mourning.’ This poem was connected in his memory to Lamotte,
with whom he had discussed it, and to their month-long tryst some thirty
years earlier. In a letter in which Ash had discreetly declared his wish that
they might find a limited time and space to be together, he had told her as
well that he had the words of John Donne before him as he wrote. In this way
Ash prodded Lamotte (much as Robert Browning did Elizabeth Barrett) to
begin reading Donne. It seems to have been Lamotte, however, who initiated
discussion of the implications of the passage in the ‘Valediction’ that refers
⁵ Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 53.


Preface

xix

to the ‘inter-assured’ mind of two lovers. Another letter in which she tells
of having read ‘your Donne’ suggests that they may have been reading ‘The
Ecstasy’ as an injunction to express their love bodily. If Byatt’s narrator assigns

these poems by Donne the work of recalling to a dying poet a central though
well hidden episode from his past, she assigns another poem an even more
decisive role in projecting the future. Ash repeatedly reads ‘The Relic’ to the
woman with whom he has never consummated their marriage, proposing that
it is ‘our poem, Ellen, ours, yours and mine.’ They seem, in fact, to share a
mutual hope that in or beyond the grave their hands will at last touch the
seals that for forty years they forbore to touch and that they will at last know
difference of sex. Ellen does what she can to prepare for this possibility. On
her husband’s tombstone she has inscribed Donne’s words ‘One short sleep
past we wake eternally.’ Later she sees to her own burial in a common grave
with him—taking along a bracelet of bright hair and a packet of papers that
teaches a future generation something miraculous about love.⁶
For all this, the relations between Byatt’s book and Donne’s poetry are
more thoroughgoing. Donne emerges in Possession not only as a poet who
wrote movingly of ideal love but as one who—already in the nineteenth
century—was a powerful spokesman for cynicism about love. Of the fictional
Ash’s poems, one that is supposed to be among his best known is called
‘Mummy Possest.’ Its title comes from ‘Love’s Alchemy.’ Its inspiration, we
learn, is both the precursor poet and a disillusioning experience that Ash had
the last time he and Lamotte were together. Byatt includes ‘Mummy Possest’
in its entirety, in a move that would seem to deliver the coup de grâce to the
notion that it was the moderns who discovered the potential in Donne to be
rendered integral to English poetic tradition. Yet, since this poem was written
by Byatt herself, its presence helps to make good the claim that modernist
poets discovered ‘the metaphysicals’: for all Byatt’s reading of Donne through
spectacles that she borrows from Coleridge and Browning and George Eliot,
there is nothing in extant Victorian poetry quite like her poem’s engagement
with Donne.
Byatt’s quite fictional revelation of a poetic John Donne who figured largely
but secretly in Victorian literary culture thus reminded me to think harder

about what escaped the surface record of how Donne was read. The intensity
with which Possession invites readers to imagine what the Victorians may have
seen in Donne, while it pushes us to read between the lines of the commentary
on the love poems enshrined in the published record, unsettles assumptions
about what we know, and can know, concerning past readers’ experiences.
⁶ A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989; New York: Random
House, 1990).


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Preface

There were after all many experiences that the Victorians regarded, rightly or
wrongly, as not to be spoken of. Inevitably, this recurrent phenomenon became
an explicit part of my subject, since Donne’s Victorian editors and biographers
all worked within a literary culture that, as the infamous controversy about
editing Thomas Carlyle’s Reminiscences made plain, increasingly looked upon
the silences in past records as potentially rich objects for interpretation and
speculation.
In attempting to isolate and to evaluate the modes of assimilating Donne
that were prevalent in nineteenth-century literary culture, I have been helped
by Stephen Gill’s clear exposition, in Wordsworth and the Victorians, of what
a very different poet may have meant in a comparable period. About half of
Gill’s book is devoted to the creative engagement of Tennyson and Arnold,
George Eliot and others with the poetry of Wordsworth. That a book about
Donne’s nineteenth-century afterlife cannot afford proportionate attention to
this feature of literary history helps to account, I think, for two things: the
readiness with which the idea that T. S. Eliot discovered Donne was credited
in the twentieth century and the brilliance with which, shadowing Browning,

Byatt’s Henry Ash is imagined as having invented the modernists’ Donne in
a distinctly Victorian key. The bold intertextuality by which Byatt connects
her fictional poet to Donne points up a telling contrast between my study and
recent books about what the Victorians saw in and did with the poetry of the
Romantics.⁷
While Wordsworth’s poetry was readily available in countless Victorian
editions, Donne’s was slow to make its way back into print. The editors
responsible for printing Donne’s work therefore feature more largely in this
book than do the editors of Wordsworth in Gill’s study. They made it possible
for Victorian readers to suppose that it might be worth trying to assimilate
a profoundly unsettling and challenging writer. In some cases, by denying
the authenticity of certain poems and by claiming others as Donne’s, they
radically altered the picture of the author available to their contemporaries. Yet,
because subsequent editors established that most of what, for instance, A. B.
Grosart added to the canon is not actually Donne’s work, little consideration
has previously been given to the impact that these materials had on late
Victorian readers. This neglect is not so beneficial for developing an accurate
understanding of Donne as we might suppose; it distorts our understanding
of how the history of reading Donne continues to affect what we attend to in
⁷ See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); and James Najarian,
Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002).


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xxi

his life and writings. Just as it is misguided, say, for art historians who compile
inventories of antique artworks known in the Renaissance to omit from
consideration works that modern scholars have shown to be misattributions

or forgeries, so the assumption that the Victorians had the same Donne
available to them that we do creates a debilitating misperception.
By attending to the ways in which editors and readers dealt not only with
Donne’s poetry but with his prose and with his biography, we can begin to
carry out a task that the Variorum itself will not accomplish: an integration of
textual, critical, and biographical perspectives. This book therefore explores
the process by which ‘Doctor Donne’ was transformed from a subject of
hagiography: for some readers, into the irreverent and rebellious figure who
was constructed at the fin de siècle out of images and voices in the satires,
elegies, and more cynical lyrics; for others, into an exalted love poet who
became the object of a cult in the century that followed; for many more
readers than there had been for two hundred years, into a fascinating writer,
who seemed a perpetual puzzle. En route to its attempt to show how the word
‘Donne’ came at last to refer to a body of writing to which Walton’s narrative
was increasingly irrelevant, the book also pays considerable attention to forces
of resistance to reviving Donne’s poetry, among them forces that embody
ambivalence about and fascination with human sexuality.
From the point of view of those who fostered the cult of Donne in the 1920s
and 1930s, that there is now appearing a Variorum Edition of the Poetry of
John Donne would perhaps seem unsurprising. It is nonetheless, or it should
be, astonishing. What other poet has virtually disappeared from readers’ ken
for more than two centuries and then been promoted, retrospectively, to so
large a place in English literary history? By contrast with the situation of other
early poets who have been accorded variorum status, through the eighteenth
century and most of the nineteenth no comparable body of commentary
accrued to Donne’s poems. The background to the rediscovery of Donne
thus provokes larger questions than the enabling limitations of the present
book make it possible fully to pursue here. To what extent is endurance as
a biographical subject, for instance, a necessary precondition for a neglected
writer’s work later to be installed in a prominent place in accounts of literary

history?
The book takes up other questions. Granted that a writer’s afterlife occurs
partly in the private experiences of readers, partly in published work by
editors and by critics, is the institutional basis offered by the classroom also
necessary to make a writer ‘canonical’? Or is it rather, as Christopher Ricks has
proposed, that ‘the most important and enduring rediscovery or reinvention
of a book or of a writer comes when a subsequent creator is inspired


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by such to an otherwise inexplicable newness of creative apprehension’?⁸
Did Donne come to be considered a normative writer because critics who
were themselves creative writers (Ben Jonson, Coleridge, T. S. Eliot) made
significant pronouncements about his writings? because industrious editors
got his texts right and made them available? because perceptive critics secured
attention for his achievements? because teachers put him on the syllabus?
These questions about the relative importance of different modes of Donne’s
afterlife came into focus relatively late in the project, when a lead that looked
like a brief detour opened into a highway that raised questions that I hadn’t
anticipated.
The detour took me into the Harvard Archives in the Pusey Library. What
I found there contributed to the final shape that the book has taken because
it helped to focus a third question about conditions of possibility. This
question occurred to me not by chancing to witness another’s epiphany or by
encountering a provocative fictional narrative but more inwardly, as I became
restless with the stacks of photocopies I had been fingering. The question
took concrete form after a rereading of T. S. Eliot’s contribution in 1931 to

the tercentenary anniversary of Donne’s death, which he called ‘Donne in
Our Time.’ Like Virginia Woolf in her essay, ‘Donne after Three Centuries’,
Eliot ignored the Victorian background to the modernist glorification of a
precursor.⁹ When I first read his essay, I must have dismissed it as irrelevant
to my purposes. In the rereading, I noticed that the piece begins with a
disarming personal tribute to Le Baron Russell Briggs, the teacher who
introduced Eliot to Donne’s poetry in his freshman English course. Still,
carrying out so much of my research at Harvard, where Eliot had been a
student, it did not immediately occur to me to question whether in the early
twentieth century a college freshman was likely to encounter Donne in the
curriculum anywhere else. Gradually, having noticed that in the front matter
to his edition Herbert Grierson referred to having first attempted to teach
Donne in 1907, I realized that I could no longer simply take for granted
the situation at Harvard. The resources of the university, its libraries and
archives and pedagogical traditions, were not merely a convenient window
onto my subject: they were an integral part of it. What I found in Pusey’s
archives made me understand that Widener’s holdings in nineteenth-century
criticism and that the Houghton Rare Book Library’s unique collection of
Donne materials had been the groundwork that facilitated Donne’s entrance
⁸ Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 339.
⁹ T. S. Eliot, ‘Donne in Our Time’, in Theodore Spencer (ed.), A Garland for John Donne
1631–1931 (1931; repr., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958), 1–19; Virginia Woolf, ‘Donne
after Three Centuries’ (c.1932), in Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1967),
i. 32–45.


Preface

xxiii

into the curriculum; the collections at Harvard had made possible not just my
study of Donne but studies by thousands of students who had come along a
hundred years earlier. Had they attended other colleges, these students would
not have been reading Donne’s poetry. What were the implications, then, of
Eliot’s having not thought it unusual that he had first encountered Donne in
a freshman English course?
So I began to explore in archival materials how Donne was taught and
studied at Harvard for nearly two decades before Eliot matriculated in 1906.
I also made a study of the process by which James Russell Lowell and
Charles Eliot Norton created the earliest American editions of Donne’s poetry;
confirmation of the importance of their editorial work came when I noticed
that Grierson acknowledged that, had he known their Grolier Club edition
when he began editing Donne, he probably would have abandoned his project
as superfluous.¹⁰ Working with the unique annotations and artifacts that
Lowell and Norton had left behind made me increasingly curious about when
and how their university had acquired its rich collection of Donne materials.
The book that has made its way into your hands differs considerably from the
one I first envisaged writing therefore in that it moves towards chapters about
‘Donne at Harvard’ and about how Donne became an ‘academic subject.’
It does so because readers and editors and teachers working in and around
Boston played a decisive role in the larger story I have to tell, about how the
subject of Walton’s biographical narrative was displaced by a writer whose
works seem worth reading in their own right.
The assumptions that tell us that as an academic subject Donne belongs
not to the history department or the divinity school but to ‘English’ were
created relatively late in the nineteenth century. The placement of Donne
within English literature prepared for and survived the coming of modernism,
which, when it was combined with Practical Criticism and New Criticism,
promoted certain aspects of ‘Donne’ to unprecedented heights of reputation
and popularity. As the essays by Woolf and Eliot reveal, modernism proposed

that Donne speaks to us directly across the centuries; and it claimed him as
its own. That is why, until the Variorum project got under way, the standard
bibliographies available to scholars took 1912 (the date of Grierson’s edition)
as the starting point of Donne studies, and why for so long in popular
accounts of literary history and in debates about the canon, it remained
curiously axiomatic that Eliot discovered Donne.¹¹ It is not the business of the
¹⁰ Herbert J. C. Grierson, Introduction, The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1912), ii, p. cxiii n.
¹¹ The invaluable bibliographical work of John R. Roberts takes as its starting point the date
of Sir Herbert Grierson’s edition of Donne’s Poems: see John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography


xxiv

Preface

book to refute the popular misconception. What I aim to do is to chart that
large and complex terrain that made Donne ‘discoverable.’
While the book culminates in a study of literary culture during the last
two decades of the nineteenth century, I want to acknowledge that a certain
falling off of interest took place before the 1920s. Good reasons could be
adduced for extending this study to include the two decades before 1921 when
Grierson published the anthology called Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the
Seventeenth Century, of which Eliot’s essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ was
ostensibly a review.¹² Treating Grierson and Eliot and the other modernist
poets who made Donne a decisive precursor, however, warrants sustained
study in its own right. Aware as I am that editors of the Variorum Edition have
announced a forthcoming volume that will cover the whole history of Donne’s
reputation as a poet, I aim here to provide an account of a key episode in
that history: how, by the end of the nineteenth century, interest in Donne’s

poetry became by far the most intensive that it had been since the middle of
the seventeenth, so that it had ceased to be likely that one might overhear the
exclamation, ‘I never knew Donne was a poet!’
I should like to suggest what may be gained, and what we ought not to
expect to gain, from my version of the history of Donne in the nineteenth
century. I do not think that there is much in this book that will be of direct
methodological relevance to the problems in reading Donne that readers have
today. The frameworks brought to bear on any particular writer not only
change over time; they can never again be the same as those that have existed
in the past. This is not to say that we cannot learn anything by examining
the ways in which previous readers have produced their interpretations. What
we learn has chiefly to do with the cultural assumptions and interests that
have generated diverse and often highly contradictory constructions of the
author. In Chapter 1 I will argue that this is what is of greatest interest in
a variorum commentary. Here I will simply observe that it often enhances
the pleasures of reading to compare what we see and feel with what others
have seen and felt. I offer this distillation of how others have read Donne,
a subject just intractable and intriguing enough to have engaged me for
of Modern Criticism 1912–1967 (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1973); John Donne: An
Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism 1968–1978 (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press,
1982); John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism 1979–1995 (Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne Univ. Press, 2004).
¹² Eliot’s essay now known as ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ first appeared as a review of Grierson’s
Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, Donne to Butler (Oxford: Clarendon,
1921) in the Times Literary Supplement, 1031 (10 Oct. 1921). Cf. the coda in Anne Ferry’s
Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ.
Press, 2001), 247–50.