ABSTRACT
That will always, as things go, be Donne’s fate as a poet-great glory, but not broad. He captures an ardent, almost impassioned, few; but has little share in the admiration of the many. He is too bare and direct, and he is too obscure and abstruse. He is at the same time too little and too much a poet. Jonson, indeed, though he en-thusiastically acknowledged him as ‘the first poet in the world for some things’, also remarked in convivial confidence to Drummond, that ‘Donne himself, for not being understood, would perish.’ It is undeniable that the full appreciation of his work, even by his devotees, needs not only all the research, scholarship, acute analysis, and sustained and penetrating diligence and thought that Professor Grierson has given to this new and surely definitive edition: it needs also some temperamental affinity, a certain openness of mind, and freedom from prejudice. To some extent, too, even in regard to the work of Donne’s headlong, hedonistic youth, such appreciation is a question of age. Life, fortunately, does not empty her whole cornucopia of delights on man’s devoted head in one generous gesture. She refuses to let him ever irretrievably ‘come of age’. She reserves joys for maturity, joys for antiquity. And Donne is among those intended for life’s meridian-when we look before and after and are compelled to realise that thenceforth, though our wisdom may ripen, it will ripen at the expense of the tree.
