nineteenth century ² and push the Donne revival back to Johnson, there
is a measure of general truth. When I sat for an Oxford scholarship in
1926 I was told that I had won it by my answers on Donne and Milton.
I reported this to my grandfather, a retired schoolmaster well-read in
poetry classical and English. He was delighted by my passion for Milton,
but hesitated when I mentioned Donne. Then, with an effort of memory,
he went to his shelves, picked out an obviously unread book and handed
it to me with the comment "Queer stuff. If you like it you had better have
this." It was Tonson's edition of 1719, my first "Donne item." I cannot
believe that a septuagenarian of similar education twenty years later
would have been so unaware of Donne's poetry, and would not have had
on his shelves either Grierson's one-volume edition of the poems or Mr.
John Hayward's immensely popular "Nonesuch" Donne. The evidence
for Donne's sudden rise to wide popularity in the twentieth century is the
same as the evidence for his popularity in the thirty years after his death:
the number of editions of his poems.

There is little to suggest that Donne's poetry was at all widely known
before 1620. The few references that have been found are to the Satires
and "The Storm" and "The Calm." A few of his lyrics came into the
hands of musicians and were set; but they were neither quoted from nor
imitated. The dedication to the "Metempsychosis," dated August 1601,
suggests that Donne was planning a long poem and intending to publish
it; but he stopped after one canto and changed his mind. His only other
attempt to win fame as a poet was with the two Anniversaries, published
in 1611 and 1612. Here again he abandoned his plan, which was for an
annual tribute. With his ordination in 1615 it was out of the question
for him to publish his verse and Jonson in 1619 told Drummond that
Donne "since he was made Doctor" repented highly and wished to destroy
his poems. It was too late. The existence of a large number of manuscript
copies, mainly dating from the 1620's, shows that by then Donne's poems
had reached a wider circle than the friends of his youth, and as soon as
the Dean of St. Paul's was dead his poems were got into print. They
appeared in 1633 with an impressive collection of funeral elegies ap-
pended. The most famous of these is that by Thomas Carew, the most
accomplished of the Caroline poets. He spoke for his generation when he
wrote Donne's "epitaph":

Here lies a King, that rul'd as hee thought fit
The universall Monarchy of wit.

It was the "wit" of Donne, not his music or his passion, or his dramatic
force, that the Caroline poets tried to emulate, and it was because of a
change in the notion of what "true wit" was that Donne sank in repute.

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