John Donne and the New Philosophy

Abstract

THE author explains in his preface that, while this book was undertaken as an “academic exercise”, it fulfils a long-standing desire dating from a time many years earlier when he fell under the spell of Donne's poetry and noticed that none of the numerous and worthy studies of his life and works which have appeared in recent years seemed to touch more than lightly on the subject of his response to the new philosophy; whereas he (the author) conceived the idea that in Donne's familiarity with the “new science” there might be found an explanation of the compelling interest he has had for the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. He wished, therefore, by this study to provide a necessary supplement to such books as “The Life and Letters of John Donne”, by Edmund Gosse (1899), and the prefaces, introductions and notes to the editions of his poems by Charles E. Norton (1895), E. K. Chambers (1896), and Prof. Herbert J. C. Grierson (1912), as well as “A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne” by Mrs. Evelyn M. Simpson (1924). Professor Grierson had already remarked that “No other poet of the seventeenth century known to me shows the same sensitiveness to the consequences of the new discoveries of traveller, astronomer, physiologist and physician as Donne”; and Mrs. Simpson clearly saw that, as a result of the influence upon Donne of the beginnings of modern science, “the break up of a whole system of thought is reflected in his pages”.

John Donne and the New Philosophy

By Prof. Charles Monroe Coffin. Pp. ix + 311. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1937.) 17s. 6d. net.