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Poems, by J.D. (1633 and 1635), the O’Flahertie Manuscript, and the Many Careers of John Donne

This chapter shows how the 1635 second edition of Poems, by J.D. promulgated the tale of Jack Donne’s transformation into Doctor Donne in response to concerns about the volume’s reception by an unidentified reading public. The 1633 first edition had presented Donne’s poems in a loosely organized collection resembling a manuscript miscellany, while the O’Flahertie manuscript (Harvard MS Eng. 966.5), created around the same time, divided the poems by genre in order to highlight Donne’s religious poems. Critics have long recognized that the changes in the second edition of Poems, by J.D. made it more biographically suggestive than the first, but they have taken for granted that this version of Donne’s life story would have been self-evident to readers in 1635. This chapter argues that the revised second edition created this narrative and, in the process, radically changed the way readers read and understood both John Donne and poetic authorship.