David Novarr
The Disinterred Muse: Donne's Texts and Contexts.
Cornell University Press, 1980. 0801413095 218 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in light blue cloth, with stamped dark blue lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket shows sunning to spine panel but is otherwise in fine condition. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
""The Disinterred Muse" dramatizes remarkably the processes of true scholarship put to the services of literary understanding, response, and judgment. Novarr is a scholar who listens to poems and who is interested in poetic structure. He heresifts the evidence concerning the occasions, genres, the purposes of the poems Donne wrote after taking holy orders, and for almost every poem comes up with fresh insights, significantly new datings, or radically new interpretations. He has illuminating things to say about the Holy Sonnets and the great Hymns, and the most remarkable insights into the translations and the devotions that I have seen. All scholarly readers, like all future editors, will have to take into account Novarr's work." --Joseph H. Summers, Professor of English, University of Rochester.
In 1614, just prior to his ordination, John Donne renounced the writing of verse. He was well aware of the widespread opinion that "rhyming" was an inappropriate avocation for a man of the cloth. Yet, on certain occasions, Donne did again write poetry.
In this group of five related essays, David Novarr takes a new look at Donne's poems -- both secular and divine -- written before and after his ordination. He reassesses the validity and utility of widely accepted contexts which define our understanding of particular poems, and proposes fresh approaches and interpretations.
The major essay, "Two Flamens: The Poems of Dr. Donne," is the first full study of the fourteen poems Donne supposedly wrote after he had said he would write no more. In this long essay, never before published, Novarr examines  the chronology of the poems, analyzes their meaning, and attempts to define Donne's conception of the functions of poetry. In another new essay, "Contextual Study and Donne's "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning," he discusses specific contexts relevant to Donne's praise of human love.
In three other essays, Novarr reassesses Donne's wit in "The Exstasie" in the context of love casuistry; stresses the satiric elements in the "Epithalamion made at Lincoln's Inn" and sets forth the poem's relation to Inns of Court reveling; and argues for a new dating of "La Corona."
Novarr's knowledge of Donne's life, his critical insight, and his attention to the details of Donne's texts -- all join to make "The Disinherited Muse" a major contribution to our understanding of Donne and his art."