§6. "Elegies". XI. John Donne. Vol. 4. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.

XI. John Donne.

§ 6. Elegies.

Of the Elegies, the canon is more difficult to ascertain exactly. Some of the most audacious, but not least characteristic, were excluded by the first editor, but crept into subsequent issues. Of the twenty given in Chambers’s edition, all are Donne’s, with the possible exception of the twelfth, “Come, Fates, I fear you not”; and to these should be added that entitled Love’s War, in the appendix, which was first printed by Sir John Simeon. But the sixteenth, “To make the doubt clear that no woman’s true,” was included in Ben Jonson’s posthumous Underwoods, and it is not impossible that the three which there accompany it are also Donne’s. As Swinburne has pointed out, they are more in his style than in that of Jonson. On the other hand, no MS. collection of Donne’s poems includes them, whereas their companion appears in more than one.