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Jonathan F S Post, PLEASING THE WISER SORT
Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention. By David Marno., Essays in Criticism, Volume 68, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 126–135, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgx025Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
One way to get a purchase on David Marno’s learned, densely argued, and stimulating book is to recall a well-known remark made roughly contemporaneously with Donne’s emergence as a poet. The bookish Gabriel Harvey commented, in his 1598 copy of Speght’s edition of Chaucer, that ‘the younger sort takes much delight in Shakespere’s Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them to please the wiser sort’. A similar point can be made about Donne’s readership. His early erotic poetry, the Elegies, certainly, and some of the Songs and Sonnets, have a long history of appealing to ‘the younger sort’. In their day and ours, as part of the story of Donne’s recovery in the early twentieth century and continuing on in the classroom today, poems such as ‘The Flea’ and ‘The Good Morrow’ – to cite two frequent introductory poems to various editions of Donne’s verse – have left their mark on generations of readers. But ‘the wiser sort’, beginning with Donne’s first biographer, Isaac Walton, have often sought to champion the later, divine Donne, the convert to the English Church and eventual dean of St Paul’s and sermoniser. This shift is borne out in much recent commentary. Secular Donne certainly has his adherents (this reviewer being one of them), but, in scholarly circles at least, Donne’s religious writings have come increasingly to the fore – the sermons, especially – as has the study of religion in the early modern field more generally. Nonetheless, as Marno points out, almost in passing, ‘Donne’s devotional verse has still not seen a book-length study’.
