A major editorial and interpretive undertaking, this edition includes a newly edited critical text based on exhaustive study of all known manuscripts and significant printed editions of Donne's poetry and a complete digest of critical and scholarly commentary on the poetry from Donne's time to the present. For this edition over 5, 000 non-holographic manuscript copies in 239 seventeenth-century commonplace books, poetical miscellanies, and collections of Donne's poetry have been consulted. Instead of the Donne institutionalized by the printer of the posthumous 1633 edition of the poetry, this edition's Donne composed his poems one at a time, distributed them to friends, kept no archive, and published only a handful of texts.


Because the critical commentary on the poetry is now too vast and too dispersed for the individual scholar to navigate alone, this variorum edition also includes an organized digest of all criticism and scholarship on Donne's poetry from the past nearly 400 years.


The edition will be of significance not only to students of Donne and the seventeenth century, but also to textual scholars, bibliographers, students of the history of poetry, intellectual historians, and historians of literary criticism of the past four centuries.