ROBIN ROBBINS (ed.), The Complete Poems of John Donne

Abstract

THE book under review is a re-issue, in single-volume paperback, of Robin Robbins's original two-volume hardback The Poems of John Donne (2008). Published in the celebrated Longman Annotated English Poets series, this edition is destined for undergraduate reading lists, and so is in direct competition with other affordable single-volume editions of Donne's verse (like John Carey's volume in the Oxford World's Classics series). Robbins's paperback edition is, as the imprint tells us, ‘revised’. It is also retitled to The Complete Poems of John Donne. The revisions remain unspecified, and so appear to pertain only to the fact that two volumes have been conflated into one, and so the necessary bibliographical matter had to be changed accordingly. It appears that the first and revised editions are, in all other aspects, identical. Given the complicated textual history of Donne's poetry and the ultimately unsettled nature of his canon, the notion of a Complete Poems is a fantasy, ironically underwritten by the fact that the first of Robbins's Dubia (or poems of uncertain attribution), ‘Sappho to Philaenis’, is a poem that was treated as canonical by Grierson in his landmark edition of 1912. If this renders the retitling of the paperback somewhat unfortunate, Robbins's edition is otherwise sensitive to the bibliographical complexity of transmission of Donne's verse. Indeed, Robbins set himself the task ‘for each individual poem’ to start ‘from the manuscript version which presents, judging from what is known of Donne's preferences, the cultural influences of the time, and the nature of that manuscript, the most likely text of that poem’ (p. xvii). This situates Robbins somewhere between Carey's edition, which disregards manuscript complexity almost entirely, and the bibliographically rigorous but also mind-bendingly complex Donne Variorum edition that is still in progress. In Robbins's words, ‘the recording of every vagary and mistake of every scribe of every manuscript’ is a ‘hopeless task’ (xviii); instead, Robbins stays close to the three groups of canonical Donne manuscripts, picks his best text, and (following the Longman house-style) imposes modern spelling and punctuation. Other reviewers of the first edition (for example, Helen Wilcox, RES, lxi (249), (2010), 296–9) have observed how Robbins's general refusal to edit eclectically results in some surprising renditions of much loved lines of Donne; or how the changing of titles, like ‘To Christ’, will confuse generations of readers more familiar with ‘A Hymne to God the Father’ (in this edition, p. 575). This is a valid criticism, yet it may conversely be argued that Robbins's reliance on his chosen manuscript copy-text presents the modern reader with just a flavour of the early-modern manuscript variance that defines the Donne canon.