- [UNTITLED]
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Contributors
- Note to Readers
- General Introduction
- Introduction
- The composition and dissemination of Donne's writings
- John Donne's seventeenth-century readers
- Archival research
- Editing Donne's poetry: From John Marriot to the Donne <i>Variorum</i>
- Editing Donne's poetry: the Donne <i>Variorum</i> and beyond
- Modern scholarly editions of the prose of John Donne
- Research tools and their pitfalls for Donne studies
- Collaboration and the international scholarly community
- Introduction
- The epigram
- The formal verse satire
- The elegy
- The paradox
- The paradox: <i>Biathanatos</i>
- Menippean Donne
- The love lyric [Songs and Sonets]
- The verse letter
- The religious sonnet
- Liturgical poetry
- The problem
- The controversial treatise
- The essay
- The anniversary poem
- The epicede and obsequy
- The epithalamion
- The devotion
- The sermon
- The prose letter
- Introduction
- The English Reformation in the mid-Elizabethan period
- Donne's family background, birth, and early years
- Education as a courtier
- Donne's education
- Donne's military career
- The Earl of Essex and English expeditionary Forces
- Donne and Egerton: the court and courtship
- Donne and Late Elizabethan Court Politics
- Donne's Wedding and The Pyrford Years
- New Horizons in The Early Jacobean Period
- The Death of Robert Cecil: End of An Era
- Donne's Travels and Earliest Publications
- Donne's Decision to Take Orders
- The Rise of The Howards At Court
- Donne and Court Chaplaincy
- The Hazards of The Jacobean Court
- Donne's Readership At Lincoln's Inn and The Doncaster Embassy
- International Politics and Jacobean Statecraft
- Donne: The Final Period
- Donne, The Patriot Cause, and War, 1620–1629
- The English nation in 1631
- The death of Donne
- Introduction
- Donne and apostasy
- Donne, women, and the spectre of misogyny
- Donne's Absolutism
- Style, Wit, Prosody in The Poetry of John Donne
- Do Donne's writings express his desperate ambition?
- ‘By Parting Have Joyn’d Here’: The Story of The Two (Or More) Donnes
- Danger and discourse
- Bibliography
- Index 1: Conceptual Tools
- Index 2: Personal Names
- Index 3: Place names
- Index 4: Individual works discussed
Abstract and Keywords
Donne's songs and sonnets, commonly known as the love lyrics is the focus of this article. The love lyrics are commonly thought to be short non-narrative poems that, in contexts representing experiences of love and sex, articulate the subjective thoughts and emotions of a single speaker. This definition, emerged relatively recently in the history of thinking about literary kinds. It is not clear that Donne himself thought of these poems as a group. The editors of the Variorum have compiled evidence that these poems entered manuscript circulation one by one at different times, perhaps over a period of more than two decades. Donne's earliest readers necessarily encountered them piecemeal; and these poems would seem to have as good a claim as any of his verses to qualify as the random ‘pieces’ that, ‘had been loosely…scattered in his youth’ and that their author later ‘wisht…had been abortive…’.
Keywords: John Donne, songs, sonnets, Variorum, love lyrics, manuscript
Dayton Haskin teaches English and comparative literature at Boston College. He is the author of Milton's Burden of Interpretation and of John Donne in the Nineteenth Century and is also a contributing editor to The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. He has written on a range of topics related to Donne, including the Sermons, the erotic and the religious poems, the first American editions of the poetry, the biography, and the history of the writer's reputation. At present he is studying the early fabrication of a literature curriculum in American colleges at the end of the nineteenth century and writing a book on what happened to Shakespeare and Milton when they were turned into academic subjects.
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- [UNTITLED]
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Contributors
- Note to Readers
- General Introduction
- Introduction
- The composition and dissemination of Donne's writings
- John Donne's seventeenth-century readers
- Archival research
- Editing Donne's poetry: From John Marriot to the Donne <i>Variorum</i>
- Editing Donne's poetry: the Donne <i>Variorum</i> and beyond
- Modern scholarly editions of the prose of John Donne
- Research tools and their pitfalls for Donne studies
- Collaboration and the international scholarly community
- Introduction
- The epigram
- The formal verse satire
- The elegy
- The paradox
- The paradox: <i>Biathanatos</i>
- Menippean Donne
- The love lyric [Songs and Sonets]
- The verse letter
- The religious sonnet
- Liturgical poetry
- The problem
- The controversial treatise
- The essay
- The anniversary poem
- The epicede and obsequy
- The epithalamion
- The devotion
- The sermon
- The prose letter
- Introduction
- The English Reformation in the mid-Elizabethan period
- Donne's family background, birth, and early years
- Education as a courtier
- Donne's education
- Donne's military career
- The Earl of Essex and English expeditionary Forces
- Donne and Egerton: the court and courtship
- Donne and Late Elizabethan Court Politics
- Donne's Wedding and The Pyrford Years
- New Horizons in The Early Jacobean Period
- The Death of Robert Cecil: End of An Era
- Donne's Travels and Earliest Publications
- Donne's Decision to Take Orders
- The Rise of The Howards At Court
- Donne and Court Chaplaincy
- The Hazards of The Jacobean Court
- Donne's Readership At Lincoln's Inn and The Doncaster Embassy
- International Politics and Jacobean Statecraft
- Donne: The Final Period
- Donne, The Patriot Cause, and War, 1620–1629
- The English nation in 1631
- The death of Donne
- Introduction
- Donne and apostasy
- Donne, women, and the spectre of misogyny
- Donne's Absolutism
- Style, Wit, Prosody in The Poetry of John Donne
- Do Donne's writings express his desperate ambition?
- ‘By Parting Have Joyn’d Here’: The Story of The Two (Or More) Donnes
- Danger and discourse
- Bibliography
- Index 1: Conceptual Tools
- Index 2: Personal Names
- Index 3: Place names
- Index 4: Individual works discussed