SOURCE: Tourney, Leonard D. “Joseph Hall and the Anniversaries.” Papers on Language and Literature 13, no. 1 (winter 1977): 25-34.

In this essay, Tourney contends that Hall's prefaces to Donne's Anniversaries reveal that there was a contemporary critical understanding that Donne's eulogies were written to convey a didactic kind of meditation, to demonstrate praise of God, and to compose verse in the Petrarchan rhetorical tradition.

The response of Donne's contemporaries to his two long and elaborate elegies on the death of Elizabeth Drury has been a recurrent issue among modern critics. Most have agreed with Sir Herbert Grierson that the poems were considered failures and have looked to Ben Jonson's censure of their blasphemy and extravagance for the causes of their unpopularity. O. B. Hardison has argued that the poems were successful, grounding his rebuttal on the fact that they were twice reprinted in Donne's lifetime, imitated, and on the unlikelihood...