Materials

The material foundation of the project is twofold: (a) the formatted, proofread transcriptions of Donne’s poems prepared for use in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John  Donne and (b) the various seventeenth-century editions of Donne’s Poems, by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death held in Cushing Library.   We have also obtained permission to present (c) images of St. Paul’s Cathedral Library manuscript 49.B.43, and we hope to add other manuscripts as the site develops.   The first volume to go online is the Henry White copy of the 1633 Poems, which has resided in Cushing for something over twenty years.   It will be followed in due course by the St. Paul’s manuscript and by A&M’s copies of the 1635, 1639, 1649, and 1650  Poems,  purchased from the library of the late I. A. Shapiro in 2004, as well by the copy of the 1669 Poems that the university already owned.  The copies read against these volumes in the search for press variants include those at the following locations:

      The Bodleian Library (O)* 
      The British Library (L)
      Harvard University (MH)
      The Henry E. Huntington Library (CSmH)
      The John Rylands Library (M)
      St. John’s College, Oxford (OJn)
      The University of Michigan (MiU)*
      Wadham College, Oxford (OWa)*
      Yale University (CtY).

*These copies have not been thoroughly collated, and their readings cannot be inferred when not explicitly reported.

Cushing Library’s two copies of the 1633 Poems are designated

       TxAM(1) (the Henry White copy) and
       TxAM(2) (the Shapiro copy).

As copies in other repositories become relevant to this project, they will be added to the list.

The Transcriptions

In presenting the Henry White copy of the 1633 Poems, we have sought to transcribe its texts of the poems exactly (we have not transcribed either non-Donne poems or the prose included in the volume).   In instances involving press variants, we record the reading of the White volume in the transcriptions, citing variant readings in an asterisked pop-up box and indicating whether the variant represents the corrected (cor) or the uncorrected (unc) state of the text.  A similar procedure will be followed in the treatment of the later editions.