Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. 1, Donne and the New Philosophy.

In Donne and the New Philosophy, the first of a two-volume sequel to the Essays on Shakespeare, published in 1986, editor John Haffenden has assembled all of the essays on Donne published during Empson's lifetime, from "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition" (1949) to "Rescuing Donne" (1972), along with a handful of related essays seen here in print for the first time. It seems unlikely that any other critic of English literature has been so often described as "pugnacious," and the contentiousness for which Empson became famous is very much in evidence throughout this volume, in which one witnesses his ongoing defense of his own Donne against the misconstructions of rival critics who, he felt, frequently had "no contact with the poet's interests" (19798).

At the center of the controversy is a point to which these essays return time and again: Empson's insistence that Donne's Elegies, Songs and Sonnets reveal the mind of a poet investigating the theological implications of postCopernican astronomy, particularly the possibility of life on other worlds. Empson states the problem in the following manner:

As soon as Copernicus' book came out, Melanchthon said that it implied inhabitants of other worlds, and that this was incompatible with Christianity. Either the Father had been totally unjust to the Martians, or Christ was crucified on Mars too; indeed, on all inhabited planets, so that his identity in any one appearance became precarious - a theologian could be driven near to the position of the discreditable Family of Love, that Christ was merely a state of mind which any convert could achieve. (12930)

Critics like T.S. Eliot, who pronounced in 1932 that "Donne was . . . no sceptic," and Rosemond Tuve, whose Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery stressed the influence of the rhetorical tradition on Donne while downplaying that of the new philosophy that had called all in doubt, were plucking the poet from history and so obscuring the very ideological conflicts which, in Empson's eyes, energized the poetry.

The scholar who motivated Empson to make the most detailed defence of his position, however, was Helen Gardner, whose 1965 edition of Donne's Elegies and Songs and Sonnets takes a bashing in "Donne in the New Edition" (1966) and the tellingly entitled "Rescuing Donne" (1972). Empson saw Gardner's edition as an attempt to further institutionalize the enervated, de-historicized Donne, and his attempt to block the process led him to a careful critique of her work, in which he effectively pointed to some perilous cracks in its foundation. Most notably, he observed that Gardner's identifications of "good" and "bad" texts are frequently arbitrary, and that her method tends to obscure the potentially valuable textual histories of individual works.

The volume is prefaced with a lengthy essay by Haffenden, who provides exactly the sort of detailed and thorough overview that one might expect from Empson's biographer. In closing, he suggests that "it is high time to look again at Empson's critique" of Gardner's standard edition of Donne. Perhaps he is right.

BRIAN PATTON King's College, London, Canada