The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne The Holy Sonnets [Hardcover]

Praise for previous volumes:
This variorum edition will be the basis of all future Donne scholarship. Chronique

This is the 4th volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne to appear. This volume presents a newly edited critical text of the Holy Sonnets and a comprehensive digest of the critical-scholarly commentary on them from Donnes time through 1995. The editors identify and print both an earlier and a revised authorial sequence of sonnets, as well as presenting the scribal collectionwhich contains unique authorial versions of several of the sonnetsinscribed by Donnes friend Rowland Woodward in the Westmoreland manuscript.

An occasion for celebration. Among the most ambitious and valuable collaborative scholarly enterprises at the end of the twentieth century. Superb.Academic libraries and specialists in Renaissance and 17thcentury studies should feel compelled to own each and every volume of this series.In the end, the Elegies are experiments in rhetoric, and whilst, for Donne as for Shakespeare, that does not automatically entail insincerity, it refuses to make sincerity the touchstone of excellence. We are seldom reminded as forcefully as by these poems that in the Latin poetry which underlies them the idea of rhetorical figuration is itself imaged as the application of cosmetics. March 2001Like its predecessors, . . . [this] volume of the Donne Variorum enterprise to appear is a triumph in every way.. . . This edition immediately displaces all its predecessors, and will be indispensable for scholars and libraries.

Gary A. Stringer is Professor of English at Texas A&M University.

Paul A. Parrish is Regents Professor and head of the Department of English at Texas A&M University.

In this third volume in a projected eight-volume series, Stringer presents the most authoritative texts and fullest editorial history of the elegies, including textual apparatus from all known manuscripts and editions from the 17th centl#z