SOURCE: Pebworth, Ted-Larry and Claude J. Summers. “‘Thus Friends Absent Speake’: The Exchange of Verse Letters between John Donne and Henry Wotton.” Modern Philology 81, No. 4 (May 1984): 361-77.

In the following essay, Pebworth and Summers analyze a sequence of verse epistles between Wotton and John Donne, emphasizing the historical and biographical contexts for the letters.

John Donne's profession of friendship as his “second religion” is well known, as is his concomitant belief that the writing of letters to a friend is “a kind of extasie, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then comunicate it self to two bodies.”¹ Donne wrote to his friends in prose, of course, but he also wrote to some of them in verse, and his collected verse letters are rightly considered the first major achievement in that mode in English. An important group of Donne's verse letters consists of...