The Digital Miscellanies Index and the Canon

This article looks at the reception of a number of seventeenth-century poets in the eighteenth century, using the materials in the Digital Miscellanies Index (DMI). It considers whether the existing reception narrative of the relative neglect of John Donne and George Herbert during the century is borne out by the evidence, and also looks at the ways in which the posthumous careers of Abraham Cowley and Sir Richard Blackmore are affected by posterity, according to the patterns of their reprinting in miscellany culture.