ABSTRACT
Because of their critical neglect, it has been possible to develop an approach to 'The Cross', 'A Litany' and La Corona independently of any interpretative orthodoxy. In approaching the Holy Sonnets, however, it is helpful to bear in mind the main positions adopted by critics and scholars since their attitude to these poems has been largely responsible for the refashioning of Donne as a particular sort of religious poet. Few editions of literary texts can have had as much influence on the reception of their contents as Helen Gardner's edition of the Divine Poems has had on the way Donne's Holy Sonnets have been read - and its publication in the early 1950s almost coincided with that of one of the most influential critical studies of Renaissance poetry, Louis Martz's Poetry of Meditation. Any attempt to sketch the force of these monuments to midtwentieth-century Donne scholarship runs the risk of badly underestimating it. Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest areas where it has been especially noticeable.
