The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneious Poems - Hardcover

Based on a study of all known manuscript sources and significant printed editions of Donne's poetry and on an examination of the criticism and scholarship of the past four centuries, this edition presents a newly edited critical text of Donne's poems and a comprehensive variorum commentary. Instead of presenting the Donne enshrined in the posthumous 1633 edition of the poems, this edition reveals Donne as a manuscript poet, one who eschewed publication, apparently maintaining no comprehensive personal archive of his works, and circulated copies of his poems among selected friends, acquaintances, and patrons as he wrote them. In this recuperative effort, the editors have collated the texts in some 239 commonplace books, poetical miscellanies, and collections of Donne's poetry that constitute the manuscript record, as well as those texts in the seven seventeenth-century collected editions and all significant later editions. Volume 8, the second published in a projected eight-volume series, presents a heterogeneous collection of poems spanning Donne's entire career as a poet, from epigrams penned in the early 1590s to a one-line Latin epigram written only days before his death. Though these poems have received comparatively little critical attention, many are of considerable interest, and they present a number of fascinating textual problems that reveal much about Donne's practice of his craft as a poet.