A NEW DONNE
THE DIVINE POEMS, by John Donne, edited by Helen Gardner; Oxford at the Clarendon Press. English price, 25/-. Espo DONNE was forgotten or misunderstood for something over two hundred years. When at the end of the 19th Century he got into print once more, he was not forgotten, but he was still misunderstood — mainly because there was often no similarity between what was printed in the 19th Century edition and. what Donne had written. I remember Sir Herbert Grierson once telling me that he first became aware of this when a student asked him to explain the meaning of a line of Donne’s poetry, and after much puzzling Grierson had to admit that he could not do it. The result was years of work on the text and explanation of Donne, culminating in Grierson’s great edition of 1912, When the poets of the twenties and thirties discovered Donne as their great original, they had the benefit of reading him in a_ fine scholarly edition with an accurate text. But that was 30 years ago. The last word. proves to be seldom the final judgment. A generation of scholars and critics have turned their microscopes and their searchlights on to Donne. New 17th Century manuscripts of his poetry have come to light in libraries and the auction rooms. There had to be a new Donne. It is heartening for those of us who are fanning the flame of scholarship on our side of the world to know the Professor’ of English in Sydney is one of the editors. Miss Gardner’s edition of the Divine Poems is learned and full. Both the general reader and the advanced student will find in it all they need for the explanation of a poet who is difficult, but whose difficulties are worth grappling with. Her new conclusions on the dating of the poems will interest scholars, and indeed are already arousing the inevitable controversy that accompanies new discoveries. The general reader can safely ignore them. Here is the first volume of a beautifully printed and well-edited edition of one of our
major poets.
I.A.
G.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 13
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353A NEW DONNE New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 13
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