The weakness of Palgrave's Treasury in the Donne and metaphysicals area is
paralleled in the 1880 four volume anthology, T.H.Ward's English Poets, the
one Arnold wrote his 'The Study of Poetry' for as introduction.
My 1887 copy, which cost me 30p a vol a few years ago, has as volume one
(566 pages),
'Early Poetry: Chaucer to Donne'. Five poems by Donne:
Song (Go and catch a falling star)
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
Song (Sweetest love, I do not go)
From Verses to Sir Henry Wootton [Be then thine own home... to: if myself
I've won/To know my rules, I have and you have, Donne.]
The Will
Introduced by [Prof] John W.Hales [who he?]
'...his chief interest is that he was the principal founder of a school
which especially expressed and represented a certain bad taste of his day.'
...and quotes Dryden:
'Donne affects the metaphysics not only in his Satires, but in his amorous
verses where Nature only should reign, and perplexes the minds of the fair
sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts
and entertain them with the softnesses of love.'
Hales: 'It might better be called the Ingenious, or Fantastic School.
Various and out-of-the-way information and learning is a necessary
qualification for membership. Donne in one his letters speaks of his
"embracing the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of human
learning and languages."' (Hales then quotes Johnson.) ...
Hales: 'This misspent learning, this excessive ingenuity, this laborious wit
seriously mars almost the whole of Donne's work. For the most part we look
on it with amazement rather than with pleasure.' etc.
Thus was Donne's long neglect reaffirmed in 1880.
Max Richards at Cooee, Melbourne
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