The second volume in the distinguished Critical Heritage Series on John Donne covers, as B.C. Southam explains in his General Editor’s Preface, “a key period of fifty years ‐ from the remarks of Henry Morley in 1873 to Eliot’s review of the Love Poems in 1923”. With introductory and editorial material, Catherine Phillips completes this second volume on the reception of John Donne, begun by A.J. Smith who died while working on the project. She has “made a summary of the material ... gathered” by Smith for his intended Introduction. In addition, she has “expanded over half the headnotes” and is “also responsible for the appendices”.
Catherine Phillips’ preface is followed by detailed acknowledgments, a “Note on the text” and by a fascinating well‐written 28‐page introduction owing more, one suspects, to Dr Phillips than she is willing to admit. There are 139 responses to Donne, varying in length from the first brief comment by Henry Morley (1873), to a short one‐sentence summary of August Wilhelm Trost’s University of Marburg doctoral dissertation of 1904 on Donne’s style, to Grierson’s lengthy 1912 introduction to his two‐volume edition of Donne’s poems. There are three appendices. The first, “Publication of Donne’s poems since 1912”, is a chronological listing beginning with the 1922 Selection from John Donne, published by the Medici Society, and concluding with the late C.A. Patrides Everyman edition, updated in 1994 by Robin Hamilton, of The Complete English Poems of Donne. The second is an alphabetically arranged listing of “Poems by Donne known to have been set to music since 1872”. The third appendix, “Select bibliography”, adds four titles to that “included in A.J. Smith’s Bibliography at the back of Vol. l of the Critical Heritage series, Donne”. The volume concludes with an extensive alphabetically arranged index: “page numbers for the authors whose writings are quoted in the book are emboldened under the authors’ names”.
Clearly typeset in Baskerville and firmly bound with attractive gilt lettering on the front cloth cover and spine, the volume is packed with fascinating information. For Henry Morley, John Donne “was unquestionably a man with much religious earnestness, but he was also a poet who delighted men of fashion”. Writing a quarter of a century later in 1898, Saintsbury placed Donne “among the greatest English writers of prose as well as of poetry”. Yeats admired Donne and preferred him to Shelley: however Robert Bridges disliked “the Phallic tribe, wherefore” he had “little sympathy with Donne”. Each reaction is succinctly introduced in a headnote by the editors with details of the critic: some are well‐known, others, such as Rosaline Orme Masson, the wife of David Masson, Alice King, T.J. Backus, and Philipp Aronstein ‐ to name but four ‐ are today largely forgotten, and the excerpts are sometimes glossed or paraphrased: when this takes place is clearly shown and excisions are noted.
John Donne: The Critical Heritage, is not only a record of 50 years of reader response to John Donne. The work is a guide to the critical voices at work between 1873 and 1923 primarily in the English‐speaking world. As Catherine Phillips observes “the excerpts … make a fascinating tale of changing ideas about the nature of poetry, about the effect of social mores on a writer’s reputation”. It is a worthy supplement to the first volume and memorial to a great Donne scholar ‐ A.J. Smith. So, even at £90 this is good value to purchase, ideally with the first volume.
