The Authorship of Donne’s Verse Letters to the Countess of Huntingdon

Abstract

Abstract Donne’s verse letter to the Countess of Huntingdon beginning ‘That unripe side of earth’ was first printed in the second edition of Donne’s Poems (1635), and was reprinted as his in subsequent editions until 1912, when H. J. C. Grierson demoted it to a merely ‘attributed’ poem. Donne’s authorship, fully supported by the seventeenth-century printed editions, was contradicted by three manuscript copies of the poem that unanimously attributed it to the courtier and diplomat Sir Walter Aston. Scholars and editors since Grierson have wavered on their acceptance of this verse letter as reliably Donne’s work. The Donne Variorum edition of the verse letters (2018) classifies it as a ‘Poem of Disputed Canonicity’. I argue in this essay that textual, stylistic, and biographical evidence establish beyond reasonable doubt that Donne wrote this verse letter to Lady Huntingdon, and that Aston’s name became attached to it through an understandable error in scribal transmission of the poem.