A major editorial and interpretive undertaking, this edition includes a newly edited critical text based on exhaustive study of all known manuscripts and significant printed editions of Donne's poetry and a complete digest of critical and scholarly commentary on the poetry from Donne's time to the present. For this edition over 5,000 non-holographic manuscript copies in 239 seventeenth-century commonplace books, poetical miscellanies, and collections of Donne's poetry have been consulted. Instead of the Donne institutionalized by the printer of the posthumous 1633 edition of the poetry,...

From reviews of previous volumes:

"This variorum edition will be the basis of all future Donne scholarship." Chronique

"Academic libraries and specialists in Renaissance and 17th-century studies should feel compelled to own each and every volume of this series." Seventeenth Century News

"An occasion for celebration. Among the most ambitious and valuable collaborative scholarly enterprises at the end of the twentieth century. Superb." Early Modern Literary
Studies

This latest addition to the Donne variorum, the third to appear in a projected eight-volume series,...

Praise for previous volumes:
"This variorum edition will be the basis of all future Donne scholarship." Chronique

This is the 4th volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne to appear. This volume presents a newly edited critical text of the Holy Sonnets and a comprehensive digest of the critical-scholarly commentary on them from Donne s time through 1995. The editors identify and print both an earlier and a revised authorial sequence of sonnets, as well as presenting the scribal collection which contains unique authorial versions of several of the sonnets...

Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, the fifth volume in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne presents newly edited critical texts of the five canonical satires and "Metempsychosis" and details the genealogical history of each accompanied by a thorough prose discussion. The analysis contained in the volume shows that Donne revised each of the poems and explains how readings from the competing versions were intermingled in the early editions and transmitted to subsequent generations. The volume...