Abstract

John Donne's profession of friendship his second religion is well known, is his concomitant belief that the writing of letters to friend is a kind of extasie, and departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then comunicate it self to two bodies.' Donne wrote to his friends in prose, of course, but he also wrote to some of them in verse, and his collected verse letters are rightly considered the first major achievement in that mode in English. An important group of Donne's verse letters consists of those to male friends, and of these, the one to Henry Wotton beginning Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Soules may be the earliest fully realized Horatian moral epistle in the language. Since 1911, thanks to discovery made by Herbert J. C. Grierson, scholars and critics have known that this letter of Donne's is directly related to verse letter from Wotton to Donne beginning 'Tis not coate of or Shepheards life. But owing to an error Grierson made in dating these two letters, what has gone unnoted is the fact that another of Donne's verse letters to Wotton, satiric attack on the court beginning Here's no more newes, then vertue, is part of the exchange well. Indeed, close study of these poems reveals that Here's no more newes begins the exchange. It is answered in Wotton's 'Tis not coate of gray, which in turn is answered in Donne's Sir, more then kisses. Allen Barry Cameron has persuasively argued that Donne conceived of the verse letter as dynamic and efficacious form of discourse. According to Cameron, the verse epistle is an instrument of conceptual communication rather than self-contained literary artifact.' Thus, the epistolary mode is rhetorical well lyrical, and more persuasive-or paraenetic-than contemplative. Fundamentally referential and occasional, the verse letter is necessarily rooted in external reality. Hence, full appreciation of any particular verse letter requires knowledge of the contexts from which it arises. Unfortunately, the contexts that inform Donne's Here's no more newes and Sir, more then kisses and Wotton's 'Tis not coate of gray have been obscured by misdating and by misunderstanding of the order in which they were written and their sequential nature. Recovering the historical and biographical contexts of the exchange between Donne and Wotton is crucial, for these contexts shape the rhetorical strategies employed by both poets. Written in the midst of the ominous breach between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex that lasted through July and August of 1598 and threatened to paralyze the government, the three verse letters illuminate the personalities of ambitious young men, each of whom is attached to principal

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