A history of Donne's "Canonization" from Izaak Walton to Cleanth Brooks.

The history of reading will have to take account of the ways that texts

constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts.

The tension between those tendencies has existed wherever men confronted

books, and it had produced some extraordinary results, as in

Luther's reading of the Psalms, Rousseau's reading of Le Misanthrope,

and Kierkegaard's reading of the sacrifice of Isaac.(1)

A generation ago Cleanth Brooks's interpretation of john Donne's poem "The Canonization" might have been considered a reading that had produced "extraordinary results." Given recent developments in critical theory and practice, however, it seems unlikely that many people would now include it in an expanded version of Robert Darnton's list of historically decisive readings. The Well Wrought Urn, in which Brooks presented "The Canonization" as consummately crafted self-referential poetry, has come to be regarded as an established work that calls out to be exposed for the liberties it takes and the contradictions it glosses over.(2) Both new historicist and deconstructive critics have, though in different ways, called attention to what was repressed or deferred when the New Criticism that was popular in the middle decades of our century sought to constrain readers to find the grounds of organic unity in the texts that it cultivated. Yet the critiques of Brooks's project offered by Arthur Marotti and jonathan Culler also very to the abiding influence of Brooks's reading of Donne.(3) The very fact that Culler should have provided an extended discussion of "The Canonizati6n" in his book On Deconstruction evinces the enduring significance of Brooks's work. Before Brooks published the first version of his essay, "The Language of Paradox," in 1942,(4) "The Canonization" could scarcely have been considered an apt poem on which to test a theory of poetry. Forty years later, Culler, when he wished to assault a supposed mystification entailed in discovering organic unity in a verbal artifact, was able to take for granted that his readers would understand the appropriateness of deconstructing this particular Donne poem.

One extraordinary result" of Brooks's having made of "The Canonization" a paradigmatic poem for the New Criticism is that antithetical critics treat it as if it has always been considered a literary monument. Through most of the three centuries after Donne wrote it, however, the poem received little attention. That it should have taken so long for "The Canonization" to be thought significant in literary history might be regarded either as something of a curiosity or as further evidence for the doctrine that meanings are constructed, not merely found. Nonetheless, attention to the history of reading "The Canonization" through the long period between its first appearance in print in 1633 and the publication of "The Language of Paradox" in 1942 suggests that the marginal status of a poem now thought to be quintessential Donne may not have been so much an accident as it was an "extraordinary result" of another confrontation with Donne's poem by an earlier and powerfully influential reader. In large measure the history of "The Canonization" was shaped by the writer who sought to canonize Donne's life, his first biographer, Izaak Walton. My proposal is that, without ever explicitly mentioning the poem, Walton's Life and Death of Dr. Donne long served as a severe restraint on interpretation of "The Canonization" until, at the end of the nineteenth century, that same Life was suddenly seen to provide grounds for interpreting the poem in ways almost diametrically opposed to those in which it had previously been read.

Besides the fact that "The Canonization" enjoyed no particular prominence before the 1940s, a second striking feature about the history of interpreting the poem is that it was more than two and a half centuries until anyone seems to have proposed reading it in relation to details known about Donne's marriage. Walton's Life, a book that through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enjoyed much wider popularity than Donne's Poems, had claimed that writing poetry had been for Donne a youthful diversion and that "most" of his poems had been written before he was twenty. Yet Walton had also given great scope to the story of Donne's secret wedding, when he was nearly thirty, and its disastrous aftermath. By the nineteenth century various retellings of the story were appearing regularly in literary handbooks and popular literature. As interest in the poetry revived, several other lyrics by Donne were said to reflect incidents in his relationship with Ann More. It was not until the end of the century, however, that anyone proposed in print that "The Canonization" had been written as the poet's defense of his marriage.

This essay seeks to trace the history of reading "The Canonization" before the publication of "The Language of Paradox" and to account for the fact that the poem was only belatedly fitted into what might have seemed an obvious biographical context, a context from which Brooks's interpretation asked readers again to prescind. It will not be my purpose to urge any particular date of composition for "The Canonization," nor to defend the proposition that it was written in Donne's maturity. It is plausible that it was one of the poems to which Ben Jonson was referring when he said that Donne had "written all his best pieces err he was 25 years old."(5) There are good reasons for reading the poem in the context of Renaissance poems that promise immortality; and "The Canonization" may be thought to involve an elaborate and derisive hoax perpetrated on just those vulgar readers in the future who, in what "The Relique" refers to as "mis-devotion," overlook the outrageousness of the conceit whereby the lovers are "canonized" for Christ-like sexual exploits."(6) To trace the slow emergence of an explicitly biographical interpretation of the poem one need not accept the proposition that Donne wrote the poem as an attempt to justify his marriage, but one needs to take seriously the likelihood that the poem was read that way by some seventeenth-century readers, a subject to be taken up in Part II. Before launching into a survey of early interpretations, it will be useful to review both new historicist and deconstructionist attacks on the New Critical approach to the poem, the better to appreciate the sharp discontinuity that Brooks wrought in Donne studies when he brought "The Canonization" to the center of Donne's canon.

I

Although the Donne revival long antedated Cleanth Brooks, it is well understood that the New Criticism of which he was a leading exponent took an especially active interest in Donne, so that, as Culler's argument acknowledged, the fortunes of Donne and of the New Criticism were for a time closely wedded. The years that separate "The Language of Paradox" and On Deconstruction witnessed a prodigious and unprecedented growth in commentary on "The Canonization"; and the New Criticism contributed substantially to a realignment of pieces within the Donne canon by directing attention, above all, to the kind of poem that can be treated as Brooks read "The Canonization," as a fictional utterance in a dramatic situation.(7) In 1947, when Brooks incorporated "The Language of Paradox" as an introduction to a theory of poetry in a book that took its title from Donne's poem, he held up "The Canonization" as a paradigmatic instance of the poem that embodies and dramatizes "the doctrine which it asserts."(8) Culler proposed, however, that Brooks succeeded chiefly in displaying his own inevitable entanglement in a neverending chain of discourses. By trying to turn "The Canonization" into a literary monument, a "well wrought urn," he was responding to the poem merely as its final stanza predicts its readers will.(9) In the process, as Culler would have it, Brooks demonstrated both his presumptuousness, when he implied that his unified reading of the poem constituted a "well wrought urn" in its own right, and his naivete.

In seeking to expose the limits of New Critical theory it was no part of Culler's concern to belabor the fictional status of the discourses in which Brooks had enchained himself, or to…