Note 1 — POEMS

The authenticity of all the poems ascribed to Donne in the old editions is a question which has never been systematically and fully considered by his editors and critics. A number of poems not included in these editions have been attributed to him by Simeon (1856), Grosart (1873), and others on very insufficient grounds, whether of external evidence or internal probability. Of the poems published in 1633, one, Basse's An Epitaph upon Shakespeare, was withdrawn at once; another, the metrical Psalme 137, has been discredited and Chambers drops it.1 Of those which were added in 1635, one To Ben Ionson. 6 Ian. 1603, has been dropped by Grosart, the Grolier Club edition, and Chambers on the strength of a statement made to Drummond by Ben Jonson.2 But the editors have accepted Jonson's statement without apparently giving any thought to the question whether, if this particular poem is by Roe, the same must not be true of its companion pieces, To Ben. Ionson. 9 Novembris, 1603. and To Sir Tho. Roe. 1603. They are inserted together in 1635, and are strikingly similar in heading, in style, and in verse. Nor has any critic, so far as I know, taken up the larger question raised by rejecting one of the poems ascribed to Donne in 1635, namely, are not all the poems then added made thereby to some extent suspect, and if so can we distinguish those which are from those which are not genuine? I propose then to discuss, in the light afforded by a wider and more connected survey of the seventeenth-century manuscript collections, the authenticity of the poems ascribed to Donne in the old editions, and to ask what, if any, poems may be added to those there published.