Carew's Response to Jonson and Donne

Abstract

Thomas Carew's verse letter to Ben Jonson and his elegy on John Donne are arguably two of the most accomplished examples of literary criticism in English verse. Given the stature of their respective subjects, it is perhaps no surprise that these two poems have received more attention in the last two decades than the rest of Carew's verse put together. In a recent article in this journal,John Lyon surveys the range of responses to the elegy on Donne, and demonstrates that the different contexts within which this poem has been interpreted have led to different and contradictory readings. On the one hand, this goes to underline the richness of possibility offered by the densely textured language and images of Carew's verse. On the other hand, it might suggest, as Lyon argues, that contexts often have less explanatory power than we are at present inclined to credit them with.1 Lyon is clearly skeptical of the New Historicism, dismissing one critic as in thrall to Greenblattian notions of self-fashioning.2 This skepticism appears to derive from a sense that the enterprise of constructing a historical context is usually undertaken with a view to the outcome: that is, the desired reading dictates the parameters of a context which can