The Palimpsests of John Donne: How They Can Help the Humanities Today

In the present age of science and technology, the standing of the humanities among people of all kinds, the popularity of humanities programs for college and university students, and the relevance of humanities disciplines to public life and public policy have all seen a steep decline. The humanities seems to have little voice left in the arena of public discourse.[1] Michael Hannon, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, defines public discourse as taking place in forums of deliberation, debate, and dispute that investigate social issues and identify areas of public welfare.[2] This includes discourse that evaluates the quality of life of a community, which is dictated by policies and opinions that influence freedom, access to education, personal health, inclusivity and equality, security and safety, autonomy in decision-making, and more. No group of disciplines is better equipped to interrogate the limitations and powers of public discourse than the humanities.

Humanities students are trained to evaluate areas of conflict, injustice, or social inequity in public and private language and visual culture, and to conceive solutions that can amend our lives within society. The social sciences also could and do address such questions; however, the humanities provide a critical, fine-grained, and historical approach that examines human behaviour and society in all their depth and scope. In view of their critical powers and justice-making utility and in view of their apparent senescence, a full reintegration of the humanities into public discourse is a task that urgently awaits concerted and collective action.

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John Donne was an early seventeenth-century English poet and scholar, whose work had a varying degree of presence in the public sphere. The early modern public sphere, we might say, was a notional space of convergence where private individuals gathered to read about, write about, and discuss social and political matters. The growth of the public sphere was driven by the rise of the printing press, the emergence of a commercial theatre, the growth of a news industry, and the apparent expansion of the keen interest among people of all kinds in matters of religion and politics.[3] Donne was both restricted, and restricted himself from the public. He began to write verse for members of nobility and other scholars at the Inns of Court, then reduced access to his work to a coterie: a small group of friends and patrons with whom he exchanged verse and letters. After his ordination and appointment as priest of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1615, he began preaching to large audiences made up of kings and aristocrats, attorneys and magistrates, merchants and parishioners. He published very few prose works, and was against print publication of most of his poetry, with only seven poems, or fourteen percent, of his known canon published in his lifetime with his acquiescence.[4] The rest of his verse was only published posthumously by his son in 1633.

Donne was a fascinating literary figure who engaged in public discourse from the outskirts of London’s public. He privately contemplated the ethics of the public sphere, the boundaries between the private and the public, and the conduit between the individual and the collective. His severance from the public was a result of both his distaste for print publication and social prejudices, involving persecution due to his faith prior to his conversion to the Church of England, brief imprisonment, and perpetual reluctance to wholeheartedly engage with the reading world by way of the printing press. In this essay, I investigate the ebb and flow of Donne’s work into various spaces, and the assorted degrees of publicness in which it was circulated, focusing on the nature of his coterie. I argue that withdrawing from writing publicly in order to circulate and develop his verse in the environment of the coterie was necessary to achieve success in his public position at the end of his life, and imperative to the perennity of his verse. In examining how Donne developed a writing style that would earn him his acclaim, how the coterie supported and preserved his work, and his success as a public preacher, we can draw similarities between Donne’s coterie and the modern academy, and thus gauge important lessons on how to reframe our approach to humanities scholarship to help it travel into more public spaces.

The Inns of Court

One of the first publics that Donne wrote for was during his time at Lincoln’s Inn, where he trained to be a barrister. Lincoln’s Inn belonged to a group of institutions known as the Inns of Court, where many politically aspiring young men flocked to study law. The Inns of Court were an interesting social environment with a curious intersection between work and play that proved to be an excellent space for engaging in public discourse. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it was common for students at the Inns of Court to write poetry to recommend themselves for government or legal employment. While gaining a reputable degree in law, young men circulated their poetry among themselves and among powerful courtiers to promote their cleverness, and therefore exhibit their usefulness to the government. Writing verse displayed the gentlemen’s deftness in writing with impact and grace. For the Elizabethan and Jacobean governments, this demonstration through poetry functioned as an effective screening procedure for applicants to the civil service.[5]

To display their competency in government positions, young men at the Inns of Court directed the subjects of their verse toward topics that were relevant to the political and social interests of the monarchy. Ted-Larry Pebworth, author of “John Donne, Coterie Poet, and the Text as Performance,” suggests that the “objects of the coterie’s attention shifted as powerful countries gained or lost influence with the throne.”[6] One needed to display a keen attention to factors that were influencing public good, to say nothing of the ability to analyze and metaphorize them while maintaining a highly prized level of wit and nimbleness. Thus, the gentlemen at the Inns of Court were circulating public discourse among themselves, but their circulation of verse was not exactly of a public nature. Although they contended for as many readers of their work as they could engage, their targeted audience, other than men with similar aspirations and executions, was a specific and not easily accessible group of individuals with a highly regarded government position. However, their work was not completely private either. In his book John Donne, Coterie Poet, Arthur Marotti analyzes the Inns of Court as a “distinctive subcultural milieu,” and concludes that it is possible to attribute a common style, set of values, attitudes, tastes, and modes of behaviour to this social environment.[7]Furthermore, Pebworth argues that in circulating their work, men at the Inns of Court created an informal coterie that was ever changing in its members and its topics.[8] Therefore, their verse was not intended for the larger reading public, but rather for a contrived public that bore its own shared attitudes and group interests.

Donne’s literary career began to burgeon at Lincoln’s Inn. Here, Donne inaugurated his characteristic attention to detail, his elaborately sustained conceits, and intricate paradoxes. He developed his genres based on social circumstances at Lincoln’s Inn, and cunningly reanimated literary forms associated with the Court, such as the love complaint, the Petrarchan complimentary lyric, and the art-song.[9] He deliberately rewrote the rules and conventions of commonplace genres, questioning the social functions of literary forms in interesting ways. He began to unravel minute aspects of Elizabethan English society and present it in critical, creative way. His professional advancement hinged on his agility to navigate such genres and apply specific language and imagery. For example, he reformulated the literary language of love that flourished in Elizabethan England to be a suitable medium for some patron-client negotiations and other civil interactions in the hierarchical social structure.[10] He learned how to fashion his writing for a specific audience in terms of its form, language, and social presentation—all of which would benefit him in the spaces he would write in in the future.

In learning how to write for and in a certain environment, Donne also grasped how he could approach public critique. Donne dabbled in writing satires before he entered government service: a genre he employed as a veil over his criticism of some of his society’s central institutions: the Crown, the Court, the Church, and the legal system.[11]Donne flaunted his talent and skill to analyze and comment on the public through verse, by engaging with precarious topics that he was careful not to release for circulation among the nobility. Instead, Donne confined their distribution to an audience of Inns of Court men that he knew possessed a similar distaste for “the forms of self-abasement necessary to succeed… and fond of asserting their intellectual, moral, and social autonomy.”[12] He wrote his first two satires at Lincoln’s Inn. They are a clear reflection of the Inns of Court setting, and pose as a demonstration of Donne’s knowledge of the environment in which he and his audience lived. Donne mastered this skill by observing the political and social events and interests of England, and mobilized it to create meaningful discourse that did not shy away from critique where he deemed necessary. He was not blindly servile toward the Crown, yet ascertained that he needed to present himself so for his professional aspirations. Therefore, he cloaked his religious satires in metaphors and euphemisms, employing a literary secrecy through complex imagery that would later become the hallmark of his poetry. His critique deliberately underscored the political dimension of religious commitment: a topic of high interest for many Inns of Court gentlemen.[13] Donne’s careful circulation demonstrates again the skill to ascertain the attitudes of an environment and the reception of its criticism.

Donne’s time at Lincoln’s Inn helped him resolve what he could and could not publicly write about. Religion was inextricably tied to politics in seventeenth-century England following the rise of the Church of England, making it a topic where Donne needed to tread carefully. Born into a Roman Catholic family during a heightened period of anti-Catholic government policy and action, Donne battled religious prejudice and violence throughout his youth. He lived through the execution of two Jesuit uncles, and the death of his brother who died in prison for harbouring a Catholic priest. He grew up with little hope of attaining a university degree, and little expectation of ever procuring a public career. He converted to Protestantism sometime in the 1590s.[14] At Lincoln’s Inn, his main motivation for writing poetry was for professional advancement, now that the prospect of a career was no longer a hopeless fantasy. Hence, he wrote carefully, and developed his genres based on social circumstances and public opinions in his surroundings. However, he did not censor the subjects of his verse according to social context and opinion; rather, he limited circulation to a group that would accept and embellish his verse. It was around the time that he began to write his third religious satire, in which he refused to defend or reject Catholicism or the English Church, that Donne decided that he needed to maintain a safer distance from the public he was writing about. Donne wrote letters to only a few trusted friends at the Inn expressing a desire to engage in epistolary communication: the origins of his own coterie.[15]

The Coterie

John Donne is regarded today as an extremely intelligent and talented poet by many of his literary successors. Critic and poet T.S. Eliot applauded his agility of intellect and wit, proclaiming he ought to be considered among the “main current” of the English literary canon. Contemporary novelist Ernest Hemingway drew inspiration from Donne, including the title for For Whom the Bell Tolls: a line from Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” Donne boasts an extensive corpus, including many lengthy and densely impressive prose works that were written in an astonishingly short amount of time. Yet he was very reluctant to publish his work in print and wrote exclusively for a small group of people. It might seem absurd for such a talented poet, who struggled financially for most of his life, to deplore publication and advancement in the larger literary public by restricting access to his work to a small, selected audience. However, I argue that the coterie’s intimate environment and approach to composition made it the perfect space for Donne’s verse to be constructed, to evolve, and to be cared for to ensure its lasting impact to this day. This stage in his literary lifetime was crucial for his work to enter a more public space in the future—the public he preached to. In this space he was able to employ rhetorical and interpretive skills that he practiced for years to effectively communicate with a larger and more variegated audience. The insights the coterie offers on freedom of expression, communal authorship, and poetic preservation can be applied to the humanities’ endeavour to reclaim its place in contemporary public discourse.

The early modern literary public was a contrived public that evolved as the printing press gained popularity. It “enabled a way of being public through critical discourse,” composed of the bourgeoise who were educated to engage in such literature, and able to afford it in print.[16] It was a public that was highly esteemed, yet Donne did not want to claim his place amongst it. One reason for Donne’s apprehension was the dismissive attitudes towards the kind of poetry he was writing. Apart from ostentatious efforts to promote themselves for government employment, writing poetry, specifically elegies and love lyrics, was not regarded as a gentlemanly activity in the Elizabethan era. Pebworth diagnoses the Elizabethan regard for poetry as “an activity inappropriate for sober, mature men,” including an attitude of “gentlemanly disdain” for literature.[17] Donne was keenly aware of this judgement; in a letter to his friend Henry Goodyer in 1609, Donne referenced an old Spanish proverb, claiming it “informes me, that he is a fool which cannot make one Sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.”[18] Given this harsh perspective, it is no wonder that print publication would have hindered any future success more than it would have benefitted Donne after his education at Lincoln's Inn.

Donne also knew he could not publish his work due to the topics he frequently wrote about. Recalling the aforementioned satires, Donne could not write so publicly about such a politically explosive subject – especially given his Roman Catholic origins. He also wrote extensively about the opinions and attitudes of the Elizabethan public within the confines of his coterie, analyzing political conditions and drawing a borderline between public and private life. During a troubled time in his life, he wrote an extended essay on suicide, titled Biathanatos. James Kuzner situates Donne’s essay in seventeenth-century attitudes towards suicide, elucidating that coroners sought to ensure that while suicide was a free decision, that freedom would not decide its public significance.[19] He investigates the implications Donne makes about “how debates about the ethics of self-killing—and about whether publics are competent to decide those ethics—open onto debates about the kind of freedom that public life is thought to confer, in the seventeenth century and in the present.”[20] Furthermore, Achsah Guibbory analyzes Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” as a statement on “the monarch’s responsibilities to supply his or her poets for their private lives.”[21] She highlights that Donne did not subscribe to the idea of mutual sufficiency between the public and private spheres, but rather believed that the public is “merely a source of bounty for the private.”[22] Donne engages with public discourse’s aspect of defining the boundary between what is public, what can be public, and what should be public—all written intentionally outside of the public sphere. He highlights that the boundaries are difficult to draw, and many conflicts and paradoxes arise in trying to do so. This includes a freedom that is “vexing rather than enabling or empowering” when one is able to debate suicide publicly and decide on it privately,[23] and an insistence that the “private world of lovers is superior to the wider public world, or that it somehow contains all of that world.”[24] The complex reasoning that is required to examine such topics can be most successfully achieved while looking into the public sphere from outside of it, thus making the coterie the perfect space for thorough public scrutiny.

Donne’s coterie was an exclusive group of people who purposely distanced themselves from the larger reading public by declining publication by way of the printing press. I argue for Donne’s coterie to be seen as a contrived public, rather than a group that was isolated from the public at large. The coterie was a group of people that bore their own set of shared attitudes and interests, and operated outside of the limitations of the commonwealth. They participated in the circulation of social poetry, and engaged in critical discussion on public issues, such as the aforementioned essay on suicide. The group’s social context was nurtured through their circulation of “occasional poetry.” This pertains to poetry that was deliberately adjusted to events in a friend’s life, typically written for births, marriages, or deaths.[25] Their seclusion from the public also palliated much of the societal severance Donne faced from his position in the public sphere. When he was not writing for the coterie, he worked as a secretary for Sir Thomas Egerton, an English nobleman, judge, and statesman. It was an occupation that also granted him a seat in the House of Commons. He lost his position in 1601 after his employer found out about Donne’s elopement with Ann More, Egerton’s seventeen-year-old niece. Enraged, partly due to the secret marriage and partly due to Donne’s past Catholic faith and economic status, Egerton dismissed Donne from his post and ordered him to be jailed. He was imprisoned for six months, and reduced to the outskirts of the public sphere after his release.[26] In the face of this severance, Donne turned to the coterie as an unwavering community in which he could continue to participate in the world of literature and critical discourse, even if it was outside the public at large. The power of a manufactured public is evinced in its insulation against the prejudices, cynicisms, castigations, and constraints of one’s society. Its distinctive attitudes, interests, and values gave it the freedom to function as its own public and produce poetry that the larger public realm would not have sustained.

In addition, the small number of members, and their close relationship, fostered a sense of intimacy and trust in the coterie that would not have been possible in a larger setting. Donne often wrote about the friendship mediated between himself and his reader, including one letter where he evinced that the letters’ content was much less important than the friendship they shared.[27] The intimacy of the group allowed for a strong bond to form, and with that bond, came an enabling freedom. This is why Donne allowed the circulation of publicly perilous texts to be undertaken within the coterie. Michael Warner is right when he notes that the public can often be a “privilege that requires filtering or repressing something that is seen as private,”[28] but Donne did not allow a literary repression to be enforced on him. He accordingly reduced his work to a space that sanctioned the release of private thoughts and permitted him to completely surrender himself in his verse. When he sent Biathanatos to his friend Robert Kerr, he included a letter with instructions to “reserve it for me, if I live, and if I die, I only forbid it the Presse, and the Fire: publish it not, yet burn it not, and between those, do what you will with it.”[29] This freedom also allowed Donne to reconcile his religious anguish. In his poem “The Triple Foole,” Donne writes about being drawn to verse because it would purge his grief in a way that is crucially private.[30] He asserts that “hee tames [grief] that fetters it in verse,” and reprimands a poet that “frees againe / Grieefe, which verse did restraine” by publishing his work.[31] The privacy that Donne basks in, however, is not one that restricts the poem’s visibility only to its author, but rather one that limits the people who read it, and prevents access for the larger public. His practice of purging grief, involving many heartfelt and paradoxical works that he did not have to censor for public reception, made for a truly authentic and engaging writing style that was unlike any other poet of his time.

Authorship over texts also dissolved through the procedure of sharing poetry within the coterie. J.W. Saunders describes the coterie poem as a “public document shared by the circle,” for “more pens than the author’s might share the same paper.” Many of Donne’s salvaged poems were not written in his own hand, and the ones that were had many scribal attributions from one, or many other authors in his coterie.[32] Discourse, then, took shape in the form of poetry, as ideas were constantly passed around and developed by multiple members. Constant circulation of verse within the coterie caused coterie poetry to be treated as ephemeral. Their work was always written and passed on in manuscript form, which gave coterie poets freedom from finalizing their text. This may follow from the perspective of many powerful courtiers that poetry should be considered “trifles to be transmitted in manuscript within a limited social world and not as literary monuments to be preserved in printed editions for posterity.”[33] Donne also expressed a preference for prose in manuscript form in many of his letters. In a letter to his friend Richard Andrews, Donne decried published literature as “the book which goes on shelves abandoned to book-worms and ashes / If coloured only with the blood of the press.” He continues that a book “written with a pen, is reverently received, / And flies to the principal bookcase of ancient fathers,” emphasizing that the press would only kill what is meant to be evanescent by preserving it on paper rather than simply allowing it to live on in memory.[34] Similarly, Walter Ong argues that manuscript transmission “preserved a feeling for a book as a kind of utterance, an occurrence in the course of conversation, rather than as an object.”[35] This certainly accounts for Donne’s success in his role as a preacher later in his life, and for distinctive elements of his style, such as spontaneity and linguistic surprise. The transient treatment of poetry also explains why Donne often did not keep copies of his own poems after sending them to his coterie.

If Donne did not take any measures to preserve his poetry, which was written in a context where its existence was regarded as fleeting as speech, how is it possible that his work has withstood so many centuries, and is still accessible today? When John Donne Jr. began to seek his father’s work with the intent to publish it after his death, it was the members of the coterie that provided unparalleled aid for his task. They produced several large and small collections that were attributed to Donne and published under his name. The major collections that still exist and are available today, including the Westmoreland, Burley, and two Dalhousie volumes of his manuscripts, are all traced to Donne through his coterie.[36] The coterie, therefore, is the reason that Donne’s poetry exists, both at the time of the creation of individual poems and in their availability to twenty-first-century readers. The coterie is also responsible for the development of John Donne’s characteristic and impressive writing style that is still revered and appreciated today for the elegant execution of its complexity. In turn, the coterie helped prepare Donne for his future role as a deacon and preacher—a position where eloquence and interpretive skill were highly praised—and also a role in which Donne was able to share his thoughts and discourse about the public with a much larger audience.

The Church Public

The final space that Donne’s work travelled to in his lifetime is the ecclesial public of England. After King James enjoined him to take up holy orders, Donne set his religious uncertainties and sense of unworthiness aside, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1615. He began a prominent career as a court preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, and as the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In an age that valued erudite sermons delivered with conviction, Donne’s figurative style, daring intellect, and dramatic wit established him as a distinguished preacher.[37] Donne’s role as a preacher involved much of the literary talent that he had been practicing and evolving within the coterie: mastery of rhetoric and thoughtful interpretation of the Bible and the public, this time with a much larger audience. He continued to create elaborate conceits applied to the court, to his faith, and to the monarchy. In a sermon preached in Westminster in 1617, Donne formulated a conceit that analogized the royal court as heaven,[38] and in several Caroline court sermons, Donne explored the limitations of sovereignty in trying to address the question of whether the monarch has the right to take precedence over the consciences of their subjects.[39] The acute examinations of the boundaries between the rule of the monarch and the private thoughts of the citizens evinces the dissemination of public discourse to his ecclesial audience—a large community in Jacobean and Caroline England. Approximately 160 of his sermons survive today, reflecting their power and significance at the time they were preached. His sermons led to his later religious poems, in which we find the same brilliant mind at work, modifying his profane conceits to serve a more sacred purpose. Donne described God as a conceit-maker similar to himself in “Expostulation 19,” where he extolled God as the greatest literary stylist.[40] He maintained a respected reputation until the end of his life, delivering his most renowned sermon on mortality just days before he passed away. He was buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where an effigy based upon a portrait of himself was erected shortly thereafter.

The Modern Academy and Donne’s Coterie

Similar to Donne’s progression into the public role of a preacher from his practice and growth within the coterie, the academy aims to propel its students into a professional life where their critical thinking skills, which have been trained and polished, can be more publicly usable. Unfortunately, this charming affirmation is often not a reality. Katina Rogers, author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, clarifies the humanities PhD as a “vocational model” where academic faculty members “train students to do the specific thing that they are doing, and once today’s grad students become tomorrow’s professors, the cycle repeats.”[41] Even so, the number of professorial positions available, specifically tenure-track professorships, is shrinking as the number of doctoral humanities graduates increases. Rogersaptly calls a systemic disregard for these employment realities a “disservice” to students on behalf of the academy. How can we improve the movement of humanities scholars and their scholarship into public spaces and public discourse when postgraduate employment often also exacerbates an exclusion from public life and public work? Like the humanities, Donne experienced a rupture from his society. Yet he was able to attain a role where he was able to share his speaking and writing with a large, multifaceted public. This was made possible through the support and space that his coterie created for him, and brings forward a pertinent paragon for the humanities’ goal of engaging with larger groups of people of all kinds. In many ways, the academy is a modern-day reflection of the coterie that Donne wrote within, specifically the pursuit of the humanities in the academy. Scholars, professors, and students perpetually create a space of association and circulate critical discourse on society, policy, literature, art, history, and more. Institutions of higher education are esteemed as the nexus for publishing and reading critical discourse in the form of academic scholarship, research, and fine arts. We write for each other and with each other, drawing on the scholarship of our predecessors to guide and revise our own. Like the coterie, much of the work we circulate can be perceived as an utterance—a voice speaking into the grand guild of humanities scholarship. If we care enough and try enough to preserve it, it can echo into the future and into larger and more public spaces. We can learn a great deal from the way that Donne’s coterie functioned to ensure how we can support and attain this future.

First, Donne’s coterie emphasized and appreciated a kind of communal authorship within the group. That does not exist in the academy today. Many members of the coterie would inscribe emendations and their own thoughts onto circulating poems, adjustments which might later be included in printed versions. In the contemporary academy, we guard and glorify individual excellence and accomplishment where we might do well to rejuvenate practices of dialogical, collective authorship in order to enhance the social mobility and even the permanence of our discourse. Hannah Arendt writes that excellence has always been assigned to the public realm. She posits that “every activity performed in the public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one’s peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one’s equals or inferiors.”[42] In Donne’s case, it was because of the coterie’s rapport that he was able to achieve literary excellence. Donne’s coterie brings forward a real-life, critical version of Arendt’s claim about the public character of excellence. Donne’s coterie shows how a group of close acquaintances, sheltered from the larger public, can enable poetry able reach publics much larger than their own. The coterie shows us that practice and development in a smaller public is often required for a person and their work to progress into the public realm and achieve excellence. The communal authorship caused other members to conserve copies of Donne’s work, which led to the movement of his work into its largest public—the print public—even after his death. Collaboration should be considered essential to the creation and development of scholarship in the humanities, as it would extend its lifetime and its ability to travel into different spaces.

Donne organized and transposed his literature between what can be seen as a triadic public: the young scholars at the Inns of Court, the epistolary composition of the coterie, and the pulpits of Lincoln’s Inn and St. Paul’s Cathedral. His participation and literary excellence in all of them stems from his knowledge of how to write for each one. From Donne, we can learn that a multipartite public presence can also teach us how to cater to an audience, thus enhancing our social mobility by expanding the number of spaces that we are able to effectively write in. Therefore, Donne’s most important lesson to us is the creation of our own publics. The humanities are facing a social barrier that stands between us and a formative role in the creation and circulation of public discourse. However, when societal attitudes forbade Donne from participating in the public, Donne did not change his work, but rather changed the public he wrote in. He became selective about his audience rather than the topics he wrote about. Donne provides an inspirational testament to perseverance in the face of social exclusion. We must continue to engage in discourse on what we deem important to the evaluation and maintenance of public welfare, in an environment where it can grow and blossom into meaningful public impact. This can be made possible through the union of new forums for public discourse by creating our own publics, both within and outside of the academy. We can find like-minded people who will work with us and help us write, create, and preserve meaningful discourse. The same can be applied to the fine arts produced by fields in the humanities, such as literature and art, through which grand and profound statements on the public can be made. When access to the public realm is not attainable, or preferred as a first step, we can learn from Donne that starting small can increase the lifetime and travel of our work for the future. Through Donne, we can learn not to immediately dispute a severance from the public, intentional or otherwise, but rather catalyse it to create our own setting for discourse.

An example of a contrived public within the humanities academy is the TRaCE Transborder project. TRaCE Transborder consists of a team of researchers across sixteen international partnering institutions who have created the space and opportunity to investigate and amend a pertinent flaw in many societies: the discrepancy between humanities PhD graduates and employment opportunities. Their collaborative approach to documenting firsthand postgraduate experiences includes ensuring their work is publicly accessible through mainstream media, in order to elevate the outreach of their findings and suggestions. Their goal of generating research, awareness, and solutions for an issue of PhD mobility that reaches the public at large would not be possible without an established group of people that share similar values, interests, and convictions. TRaCE Transborder is just one of many already existing contrived publics in modern international academies whose research and discourse is travelling into larger public spaces.

John Donne—Inns of Court scholar, coterie poet, social martyr, and learned preacher—is one man who imparts important lessons on the journey of discourse between various public spaces. Donne’s life inside and outside the public sphere teaches us that even the smallest, most guarded circle of people can be the reason for the travel and preservation of scholarship. He and his coterie exhibit that effective public discourse may need to be developed in a smaller-scale public before it can move into larger spaces with grander audiences. With seclusion, Donne evinces, comes a freedom for expression and creativity. The objective of the creation and circulation of public discourse, therefore, should not be to reach as big of a singular audience as one can, but rather for it to interanimate as many manufactured publics as possible. We must remember that we are each other’s greatest conduits in broadening the reach of our scholarship. In guiding, editing, preserving, and passing on each other’s work, we can achieve a multifaceted advancement of critical discourse into the public. Writing and engaging with multiple groups of people will develop our ability not only to reach more people, but also to influence more people. These smaller spaces of association can help our discourse gain traction and influence to attain its anticipated habitation in the public sphere. The humanities can adopt this aspiration by transforming separations and barriers against scholarly travel into creations of new forums of public discourse to write and interact in.

The “public realm” is a complex and malleable term. Originally seen as coextensive with public authority, the definition of the public realm is perpetually being modified by our societies as social values and opinions gain or lose their influence. As a result, the boundary between what is considered private as opposed to public is constantly shifting. This shift has been especially prevalent in a growing technological age that has introduced new ways of being public on the Internet. The public realm is a concept that is everchanging through modern applications and novel innovations, and one that can be observed in a multitude of perspectives. No one is more qualified to evaluate these new publics than the humanities scholars and teachers. Its name, stemming from the Latin word “humanus,” meaning “human,” self-evidently reveals itself to be the study of people. With this study comes a finite attention to how we feel, think, communicate, and live in the presence of one another, which forms the foundation of our societies.

The humanities academy is the nucleus for writing, teaching, and evaluating publics and public discourse. It equips its scholars with the skills and the facilities to create meaningful alterations to our societies by deploying critical thinking, creativity, and ethical judgement. In no way does the humanities lack in qualification for thoughtful, inclusive, and important public discourse. As it stands today, our only barrier is the distance that our discourse can travel. If we accept the advice Donne gives us through his literary life story, we too will have the power to enhance the dissemination of our scholarship, and establish our discourse across more public spaces.

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