ABSTRACT
Lowell (1819-91) was another nineteenth-century poet who made no secret of his lifelong devotion to Donne and championed Donne's poetry strenuously. As Professor of Literature at Harvard from 1855 he plainly had much to do with the interest New England writers then began to show in Donne. C. E. Norton's Grolier Club edition of Donne's poems, 1895, was intended partly as a tribute to Lowell's memory. In his Preface Norton remarked that 'Donne's Poems were, from an early period of his life, among Mr Lowell's favorite books', and ascribed to Lowell's prompting the Boston edition of 1855. Norton spoke of the 'many hundreds' of marginal emendations, mainly of the punctuation, which Lowell had made in a copy of that edition and commented: 'It seemed a pity that this work should be lost, and the Grolier Club undertook the present edition for the sake of preserving it.' The Grolier Club edition was described on its title page as 'Revised by James Russell Lowell'. (The Poems oj John Donne, New York, 1895, i, pp. vii-viii.)
(i) From Conversations on Some oj the old Poets (1845), 1893, p. 159. Lowell is speaking of Chapman's section of Hero and Leander: ... If there be a few blurs in it, it is yet one of the clearest and most perfect crystals in the language, an entire opal, beautiful without the lapidary's help; but it will shine with true pureness only in
He discovered his own genius, as he supposed,-a thing impossible had the genius been real. Donne, who wrote more profound verses than any other English poet save one only, never wrote a profounder verse than
Who knows his virtue's name and place, hath none
The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be,-a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner, without a hint of the subtle and often profound thought that more than redeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne outdonne ....
