SOURCE: Everett, Barbara. “Donne and Secrecy.” Essays in Criticism 51, no. 1 (January 2001): 51-67.

In the following essay, Everett reflects on the history of Donne scholarship, contending that overemphasis on Donne as a public, active man has been misguided.

It's a quiet time just now in Donne criticism. It's a quiet time, perhaps, in anything criticism. English as a subject is putting its main energies elsewhere. But it remains an interesting exercise to ask how we actually know a given writer: what is it that's there, and why? Who do we mean, when we say ‘Donne’? For such questions, this isn't history's happiest moment.

The reason is partly that so many answers have been given in the immediate past. They may be true enough, most of them, to make them not easy to reject; but they are also dated enough to make us not want them much. We're no longer...