The continued existence of the Longman Annotated English Poets series, begun in the more expansive publishing climate of the 1960s, is a miracle, although the cost of these volumes puts them beyond the reach of many who would benefit from them most. The aim of the series remains fullness of annotation, and in this Robin Robbins proves himself a worthy addition to a line of editors of Donne going back almost a century to Sir Herbert Grierson. He even achieves the commentator’s Holy Grail, a page filled entirely by notes with no text at all. Now that editing is so often a collaborative enterprise, as in the Variorum edition of Donne which is still in progress—part of which I reviewed in The New Criterion of March 2001—it is good to have the whole of a poet’s output scrutinized by a single mind.

Robbins’s is the best edition of Donne by an individual scholar since A. J. Smith’s, back in 1971. Like Smith, and unlike some other previous editors, who took the earliest printed texts as their starting-point and collated them with manuscripts, Robbins starts from the manuscripts, the most important of which was copied, possibly direct from Donne’s own written version, by his close friend Rowland Woodward. The justifications for his choice of base text are carefully argued and, as far as I can judge, generally convincing. The dating of Donne’s poems is notoriously vague—only the two “Anniversaries” in memory of Elizabeth Drury, his patron’s daughter, were