# Is "Poems, by J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death" by John Donne a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Poems, by J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death by John Donne (John Marriot, London, 1633) is identified by: First edition: "Poems, By J.D. London 1633 is the true and only first edition of the collected Poems; there is no UK/US or original-language precedence question, since Donne was English and the book is posthumous (he died in 1631).

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition: "Poems, By J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death," London, printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for John Marriot, 1633 (STC 7045
- ESTC S121684
- Keynes 78)
- The single decisive point is format: the 1633 is a small quarto and carries no portrait, whereas every later seventeenth-century edition (1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654, 1669) is an octavo and, from 1635 onward, carries William Marshall's engraved portrait of Donne at eighteen
- Supporting tells inside the book: the Satyres show blank spaces at pp
- 330, 331 and 341 where lines offensive to king and church were suppressed; the preliminary epistle "The Printer to the Understanders" (leaves A3-A4) is variably placed, most often after A2, and is absent from many copies; pagination errors occur at pp
- Publisher imprint reads John Marriot, London

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | John Donne |
| Publisher | John Marriot, London |
| Year | 1633 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | First edition: "Poems, By J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death," London, printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for John Marriot, 1633 (STC 7045 |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition: "Poems, By J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death," London, printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for John Marriot, 1633 (STC 7045; ESTC S121684; Keynes 78). The single decisive point is format: the 1633 is a small quarto and carries no portrait, whereas every later seventeenth-century edition (1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654, 1669) is an octavo and, from 1635 onward, carries William Marshall's engraved portrait of Donne at eighteen. Supporting tells inside the book: the Satyres show blank spaces at pp. 330, 331 and 341 where lines offensive to king and church were suppressed; the preliminary epistle "The Printer to the Understanders" (leaves A3-A4) is variably placed, most often after A2, and is absent from many copies; pagination errors occur at pp. 161, 164-165, 168, 194-195, 198-199 and 250; and signature Q2 is missigned Q3. Leaf Nn1 (p. 273) occurs in two settings — one without a running title and with 35 lines of text, the other with running title but with the last two lines carried over to the verso. Dealers describe the no-running-title setting as the uncorrected state and ESTC treats that leaf as a cancel, but Geoffrey Keynes concluded the 1633 variants were random accidents of press-correction rather than sequential states, so a copy should never be graded on that leaf alone.

## Is this the true first?
London 1633 is the true and only first edition of the collected Poems; there is no UK/US or original-language precedence question, since Donne was English and the book is posthumous (he died in 1631). The census claim is confirmed. Two precedence traps are worth publishing. First, the Anniversaries were the only poems separately published in Donne's lifetime — "An Anatomy of the World" (London, printed for Samuel Macham, 1611; STC 7022) is his first published poem and an institutional rarity; the Roxburghe Club issued a facsimile of it in 1951 with a postscript by Keynes, and that facsimile is regularly mistaken for the original. Second, the 1635 second edition is the first to group the poems into the familiar generic sections (Songs and Sonnets first, Divine Poems last) and adds "Farewell to Love," "A Lecture upon the Shadow" and "A Dialogue between Sir Henry Wotton and Mr Donne" — a "first thus" only. The 1669 seventh edition is the first to print Donne's name in full on the title page and to note him as late Dean of St Paul's.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club edition of the 1633 quarto exists or could exist. What actually reaches donation bins are modern reprints and print-on-demand facsimiles struck from EEBO / Early English Books microfilm scans (Gale ECCO, BiblioBazaar, Kessinger and similar imprints — e.g. ISBN 978-1-171-25171-2), alongside scholarly and trade editions: Grierson's Oxford edition (1912), Nonesuch, Everyman and Penguin. Any "Poems by John Donne" carrying an ISBN, a barcode, perfect binding or modern typography is a reprint, not the 1633.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Poems, by J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death* by John Donne a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/poems-by-jd-with-elegies-on-the-authors-death
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.