ABSTRACT

The appearance of a very fine edition of Donne’s love poems provokes an inquiry into the reasons for Donne’s present popularity; for it is such an edition as only a poet highly esteemed by a prosperous public could receive. For the production, the Nonesuch Press deserves every compliment; for the compilation, there are only two reserves to be made. It is questionable whether the love poems should be published separately from the rest of Donne’s poems; and it is questionable whether an editor ought to tamper with the sequence in which the poems are printed. If these two licences are allowed-that of selection and that of order-it may be admitted that the editor of this volume has shown excellent taste (though the present writer prefers to see The Relic’ and ‘The Funeral’, the first verses of which are variations of the same theme, printed farther apart). But selection and order represent a criticism, the imposition of a critical taste upon the reader; it was by such means that Matthew Arnold, in a volume which still supplies to many readers their only knowledge of Wordsworth, imposed a criticism upon the nineteenth century. For Donne the danger is much less: he is less difficult and less voluminous than Wordsworth, and most of his admirers, we presume, already own the Muses’ Library edition. But the arrangement made, and very neatly made, in this volume is a kind of pigeon-holing of Donne’s sentiments.