out of the Elegies and "Songs and Sonnets" seem to me to be to chase a
will-of-the-wisp, I cannot believe that Donne's poetry had no relation
to the development of his moral, intellectual, and emotional life, and
that his readers in our century were wholly astray in finding in his poetry
the revelation of a very powerful individuality. If ideas were mere
counters and playthings to him, why did he so persistently recur to cer-
tain ideas and not to others? We may laugh at Gosse's fiction of the
"criminal liaison" and point to Ovid as the source of the Elegies Gosse
read autobiographically; but can we doubt that the author of these
Elegies, if not a rake, had a rake's imagination? We may allow Mr. Smith
that the question handled in "Air and Angels" is a commonplace among
the Italian love-casuists; but why did such "questions of love" so engage
Donne's imagination and why did he alone among the poets of his
age give them such memorable expression? He was not the only English-
man of his day able to read Italian. The scholars and source-hunters
(of whom I am one) have still to explain why a whole generation in
this century appropriated Donne and found in lines and phrases from
his poems words that echoed the feelings of their own hearts. We still
await a life of Donne, written out of a full knowledge of his age, the
circumstances of his life, and his works as a whole. When that has been
written, it will be time for a full critical study that will display the works
as the expression of the man and do justice to him both as the "Monarch
of Wit" and as the author of those verses on parted lovers of which Walton
said: "I have heard some Criticks, learned, both in Languages and Poetry,
say, that none of the Greek or Latine Poets did ever equal them."

NOTE ON THE TEXTS: I have attempted, as far as possible, to standardize
methods of reference in the essays that follow, and, in the interests of
consistency have used modern spelling for the titles of poems throughout.
Unless it is otherwise stated in the first note, the essays are printed with-
out alteration or omissions, except that spelling and punctuation have
been adapted to American usage.

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