The Poetics of the Single Sheet of Paper: From Research to Practice

This essay begins and ends with a single sheet of paper. The first was used by John Donne whilst he was in France in 1612 to write the fair copy of his verse letter ‘To the Honourable Lady the Lady Carey’. Rediscovered in 1970, this is the only holograph manuscript of Donne’s English poetry known to survive, and it offers a unique insight into the material ingenuity that Donne employed when setting out his poems on paper. Not only do the constraints of the page become an aspect of verse form, but other physical qualities of the sheet – its ability to fold and wrap, to create interiors and exteriors; its partial transparency and poignant fragility – are also brought to life by the metaphors of paper that Donne uses across his poems of this period. In this imagery, Donne seeks to re-energise the commonplace that paper is to words as body is to soul. The interlinked metaphorical and material strategies in Donne’s verse letter to Lady Carey are directed towards a question with which he was lastingly pre-occupied: how is it possible to represent – indeed even to imagine – the paradoxically material immateriality of the soul? In the service of this inquiry, Donne’s single sheet manuscript becomes a cognitive tool for the examination of metaphysical questions.