ABSTRACT
One of the most remarkable of the English pictures in the recent ‘PostImpressionist’ exhibition depicts ‘John Donne arriving in Heaven’. ‘I don’t know who John Donne is’, a sturdy member of the public was lately heard to remark in front of it, ‘but he seems to be getting there.’ Unconsciously, he summed up Donne’s recent history. Of all the great English poets, his name is least known beyond ‘literary’ circles; but he is certainly ‘getting there’. If one has entered, any time these last years, a railway carriage, and found some studious vagabond deep in a little blue book, it generally turns out to be Mr Chambers’s invaluable edition in the Muses’ Library. And now Professor Grierson and the Delegates of the Clarendon Press have given us, clothed in the most attractive garb possible, a perfect text of the poems, and an immense body of elucidatory comment.
