Note 37 — POEMS

The Grolier Club edition37 was constructed on a different principle. For all those poems which 1633 contains, that edition was accepted as the basis; for other poems, the first edition, whichever that might be. The text of 1633 is reproduced very closely, even when the editor leans to the acceptance of a later reading as correct. Only one or two corrections are actually incorporated in the text. But the punctuation has been freely altered throughout, and no record of these changes is preserved in the textual notes even when they affect the sense. In more than one instance the words of 1633 are retained in this edition but are made to convey a different meaning from that which they bear in the original.