John Donnes, familiar verse letters, epistolary, Henry Wotton, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford

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psychologically beneficial to epistolary correspondents is the central thesis of John Donne’s familiar verse letters. In exchanges with Sir Henry Wotton and Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, he, like Whitney, appears to employ a combination of epistolary decorum and satiric writing in order to harvest such mental ease. The dating of many of Donne’s epistles is a matter of some conjecture; although there is a general agreement that the majority of them were written at some time during the 1590s and the first few years of the following century. ³⁵⁴ An examination of their relationship to the axioms of amicable verse exchanges, such as those evident in the work of Googe and Whitney, offers illuminating insight into Donne’s philosophy of friendship as it dramatised and celebrated in these familiar verse epistles. Donne’s dramatisation of the relationship between himself and his friends seems related to Whitney’s representation of herself rethinking her attitude in order to align herself with T. B. The Aristotelian themes of friendship and moderation similarly recur together in Donne’s epistles and form the mutually understood language of amicable verse answering. It is also highly probable that Donne, like Googe, engineers some of the exchanges in which he participates through the strategic deployment of provocative verses.

Wit, virtue and temperance, the trinity of qualities thought necessary for good living and civil conduct in the Renaissance, are all, according to Donne, enhanced by the reciprocity of friendship as it is expressed and confirmed in exchanged verses. This intercourse enables friends to meet on an intimate spiritual level that is divorced from the impurity of the physical world. As he says in the opening of a verse addressed to Henry Wotton that will be discussed in detail shortly, “Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Soules;/ For, thus friends absent speake” (ll.1-2). ³⁵⁵ He also claims that both his creative

³⁵⁴ See R. C. Bald, ‘Donne’s Early Verse Letters’, HLQ, 15 (1952), 283-9.
³⁵⁵ ‘To S[ir] Henry Wotton’, Poems of John Donne Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous

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