From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
>...(I think of Donne penning his poems for a few friends...).
Given that there are sixty-odd manuscripts of Donne's poetry (rivalling in
number Chaucer and Langland) it's more like he was writing for the LizI /
Jimmy6&1 equivalent off Hello! magazine: "How do I love thee? / Let me
count the ..." -- give me that piece of parchment back, you little
shit-for-brains, I haven't finished yet!
Just a thot.
R.
{As a matter of contrast, although it's fifty years earlier, there are
exactly bloody *four manuscripts of poems [Devonshire, Egerton, Arundel, and
Blage -- five counting the printed Tottel collection] -- by or alleged to be
by Thomas Wyatt, and one of those -- the Blage MS -- was so politically
lethal that it only surfaced in the 1930s.
Donne was hardly a shrinking violet when it cane to distributing his
pomes -- he desperately suggested to his father-in-law Sir George More, with
regard to his early poems, that he wrote best when he had least truth for
his matter, and later in the MS of a work that argued that it was OK to to
top yourself as long as you weren't a Papist, he only forbad it (to Sir
Robert Carr, which was a bit like emailing Rupert Murdoch) the press and the
fire.
Today, the Dean of Paul's as would be, would be blogging or FaceBoookiing
himself blind.
R.}
