The view currently accepted is that Donne became interested in astronomy only after the publication of Galileo's Sidereal Messenger (1610, reporting the first discoveries from the use of the telescope); the elaborate joke of Ignatius his Conclave (1610) must have been written fast to cash in on the immediate fame of that book, and Miss Marjorie Nicolson considers that, like Donne's other interests, his interest in astronomy lasted only a few years after the initial stimulus. I maintain that he foresaw the coming theological row about life on other planets, from 1600 at the latest, and used the idea in the lovepoetry ; which indeed seems pretty trivial if you cut the idea out.

The reader may naturally answer: ‘But he could not think of it before it had happened; this criticism is unhistorical. Only a very clear statement in the poems would allow us to read into them such an inherently improbable meaning.’ It took me a long time to start poking round for historical evidence, knowing I was untrained for such work, but when I was driven to it I found at once that there is plenty of historical evidence for the kind of thing I want to say. The historical argument is all bluff.

The first Part assumed that belief in rational creatures on other planets had raised a problem about the Redeemer. Later on it did, but an opponent might answer that this difficulty had not yet been invented at the relevant time. So I was glad to find that Philip Melanchthon had printed the objection in 1549, only six years after Copernicus had printed, in his Initia Doctrinae Physicae.