DONNE John Poems. With elegies of the author’s death.

Grolier, Donne 81; Keynes, 78; Pforzheimer, 296; STC (2nd ed.) 7045.

First collective edition of John Donne’s poems, published two years after his death. It contains some of the greatest poems in the English language in first edition, including “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “The Good Morrow,” “The Sunne Rising,” and “The Flea.”

Although his poems were widely circulated in manuscript form during his lifetime, Donne rarely published them in print and regretted the few short texts he did publish: “The fault I find in myself is that I have deigned to print anything in verse” (Donne, Letters to Several Honorable Persons). Donne wrote most of his poems in the 1590s, when he was in his twenties; in his later years, as Dean of St. Paul’s, he was keen to emphasize that these early works had been “written by Jack Donne, not Dr. Donne,” the young libertine rather than the mature theologian. Despite Donne’s avowed attempts to destroy his work, the poems were, in the words of Isaak Walton, “scattered without order (God knows too without order)”, and after his death, the surviving manuscript copies of his work served as the basis for this edition, for which the original compiler used several groups of manuscript copies.

The 1633 edition remains “the best text” of the poems and “has more authority than any other printed text” (Keynes). It is worth noting the absence of Donne’s more explicitly erotic elegy, “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” which the censor refused to include and which was not printed until 1669. The book ends with the publication of a series of letters by Donne and a group of elegies written by, among others, Izaak Walton, Henry King, and, most notably, Thomas Carew; the latter’s contribution to the work is “considered by many to be the finest example of literary criticism in verse, imitating Donne’s style in order to summarize and celebrate his work” (ODNB).

“The text of this first edition of Donne’s collected Poems does not appear to have been derived from any single source. Grierson and later editors, notably Gardner and Milgate, believe that the original compiler used two sources belonging to the two main groups of surviving manuscripts, but made changes on his own authority and by reference to yet other manuscripts. The resulting text has more authority than any other in print” (Keynes).

A complete copy, with the pages containing The printer to the Understanders with Hexastichon Bibliopolae, Infinitati Sacrum at the end, which are not present in all copies.

Folio Nn1 is present in its original state (it was replaced in other copies by the folio with the signature ‘Nn1*’). As always, pages 330, 331, and 341 have a few words omitted and replaced by typographical symbols.

Provenance: old note crossed out on the title page, dated 1654 – Sir Thomas Brooke (bookplate, Sotheby’s sale, May 25, 1921) – Lord Petre (bookplate).