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date: 14 May 2021

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

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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