Abstract
We have all grown tired of the ‘masculine John Donne’ and various attempts have been made to undo him, both as poet and person. Strangely, the chief loathing of his masculine persona comes from men. He sickens Stanley Fish, exasperates John Carey, and emerges from Thomas Docherty’s less personal and more sympathetic analysis as troubled and neurotic.1 It is not the old-fashioned Victorian question of a poet’s life turning his readers against what he has written, as Donne’s life seems to have been one of almost blameless virtue, also rather chilling for modern readers. His youthful love of women and plays can hardly raise a disapproving eyebrow in the modern world; his passionate attachment and imprudent marriage to the seventeen-year-old Anne More must seem entrancingly warm-hearted in that period of frozen wedlock, where lock is as significant as wed; his exclusion from court, attempts to gain patronage, and final apotheosis amidst much conscience-searching into one of the most eloquent preachers who has ever graced the pulpit of St Paul’s, all these events ought to arouse affection and admiration rather than contempt and dislike. But the fact is that Donne’s poetry excites aversion in men — who continue to own Donne in a way that female critics and scholars do not — because its multiple voices challenge readers on that issue which has become in the late twentieth century the most sensitive of all except race, that of sexual identity and gender construction.
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Notes
Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (1986), esp. pp. 52–71;
Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago, 1990): 223–52, p. 228;
John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), pp. 91, 117 and passim;
Carey’s view of Donne was early countered by Annabel Patterson in ‘Misinterpretable Donne: The Testimony of the Letters’, John Donne Journal, 1 (1982): 37–53.
‘Donne’s Poetical Works’, The National Magazine and Monthly Critic, IX (1838): 374–8, in A.J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Critical Heritage (1975), p. 367.
Kathleen Tillotson, ‘Donne’s Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (1800–72)’, in John R. Roberts (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry (Hassocks, 1975): 20–33, p. 31.
Wilbur Sanders, John Donne’s Poetry (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 104, 105.
Joan Bennet, ‘The Love Poetry of John Donne: A Reply to Mr. CS. Lewis’, Seventeenth Century Studies presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, (Oxford, 1938): 85–104, p. 91, and, in the same volume, C.S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’: 64–84, pp. 75–6.
Alexander Sackton, ‘Donne and the Privacy of Verse’, SEL, 7 (1967): 67–82;
Alan McColl, ‘The Circulation of Donne’s Poems in Manuscript’, in A.J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration (1972): 28–46, pp. 32–4.
Izaak Walton, The Life of John Donne, DD. (1865), p. 35;
Ilona Bell, ‘“UNDER YE RAGE OF A HOTT SONN & YR EYES”: John Donne’s Love Letters to Ann More’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), The Eagle and the Dove (Columbia, 1986): 25–52, p. 41.
John Donne, A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, late Wife of Sir John Danvers, Preach’d at Chilsey, where she was lately buried’, (Together with other Commemorations of Her; By her Sonne G: Herbert), (1627), p. 152.
Helen Gardner (ed.), The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets (Oxford, 1965), Appendix C: 248–58, ‘Lady Bedford and Mrs Herbert’, p. 251: ‘It is possible that on other occasions she [Lucy Bedford] showed him others of her “compositions”, or that they wrote poems on similar themes or answering each other.’
Arthur F. Marotti, ‘John Donne and the Rewards of Patronage’, in Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (eds), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1981): 207–34, p. 224.
Donne, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1921), p. 288. All quotations from Donne’s poetry are from this edition.
The relevant manuscripts are listed in Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts (1987), I. 292–6, and 414–71.
The extra stanza, beginning ‘Lie stille, my dove, why dost thou rise?’ was set by John Dowland, A Pilgrim’s Solace (London 1612),
and Orlando Gibbons, The First Set of Madrigals and Motets (London 1612),
and has been thought not to be by Donne, although in manuscript miscellanies dating from the 1630s it was sometimes included as a first stanza (C.F. Main, ‘New Texts of Donne’, SB, 9 (1957): 225–33, pp. 229–30). In BL Add. MS 25,707, the stanza is in a different hand in the margin, with a mark to show that it should go at the beginning of the poem. But what is interesting is the variety of headings given to the poem with the additional stanza, and the disagreements they evince about whether the main poetic voice is that of: i) a man: ‘A Gentleman to his Mrs, being a bedd with him that she wold not rise’, (Sloane MS 1792, ff. 11v–12. Beal, I. 479). ii) a woman: ‘At last they enioye one the other, but his business enforseth him to make an early hast, Her lines upon it’, and a narrative which involves his answering her: ‘At the next enoiyment shee quits his rizing with an erlyer. His lines’ (Rosenbach Foundation, MS 243/4, p. 73, Beal I. 480). iii) Donne himself and a lady: ‘Dr Dunne at his Mistris rysing’ (Folger MS V. a. 262, p. 102, Beal, I. 478), and ‘Dr Dunne of his mrs rising’ (Folger, MS V. a. 345, p. 237, Beal, I. 478).
Samuel Johnson, ‘Cowley,’ Lives of the English Poets (1964), I. 15;
see William R. Keast, ‘Johnson’s Criticism of the Metaphysical Poets’, in Roberts (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne: 11–19.
For a different view, see Edward le Comte, ‘Jack Donne: From Rake to Husband’, in Peter Amadeus Fiore (ed.), Just So Much Honor, (University Park, 1972): 9–32.
The original letter, quoted in my text, is from Donne to Sir Robert More, his brother-in-law, in The Loseley Manuscripts, ed. by Alfred John Kempe (1835), p. 345;
quoted in Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (1899), II. 48, and by Woolf in Berg XX, with the note ‘of his wife’.
Maureen Sabine, Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw (1992), p. 44 and passim.
See Patricia Thomson, ‘John Donne and the Countess of Bedford’, MLR, 44 (1949): 329–40, p. 333;
for reading aloud in this period see William Nelson, ‘From “Listen, Lordings” to “Dear Reader”’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 46 (1976–7): 111–24.
John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, published by John Donne [the younger], (1651), p. 272.
Tixall Letters: or the Correspondence of the Aston Family, ed. Arthur Clifford, (1815), I. 147.
W. Milgate, ‘The Early References to John Donne’, N&Q, 195 (1950): 229–3, 246–7, 290–2, 381–3; p. 383, concludes that Donne’s individuality was the most striking impression left on his contemporaries. See also Josephine Miles, ‘Ifs, Ands, Buts for the Reader of Donne’, in Fiore, Just so Much Honor: 272–91.
John Donne, ‘Sermon Preached upon Whitsunday’ [? At St. Paul’s, 1622], in G.R. Potter and E.M. Simpson (eds), The Sermons of John Donne (Berkeley, 1959): V. 58–76, p. 71.
Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton, 1983), p. 228, quoting from MHP/B2o.
Richard B. Wollman, ‘The “Press and the Fire”: Print and Manuscript Culture in Donne’s Circle’, SEL, 33 (1993): 85–97, p. 87, 89–91. I am indebted to this excellent article throughout this section, although Wollman does not talk about women readers.
Lynette McGrath, ‘“Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe”: Amelia Lanier’s 17th-Century Feminist Voice’, Women’s Studies, 20 (1992): 331–48, pp. 345, 341;
cf. Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1987), pp. 177–207; Lewalski, ‘Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer’, pp. 97–106.
Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 219; Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, 1986).
The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. by John Florio (1928 [1603]), I. 1–11.
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge, 1923), p. 8.
Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates (Berkeley and London, 1983), p. 33.
Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne (1899), I. 17–18.
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 2–4, p. 11: ‘Obviously these Jacobean women did not and could not change their world, but they were able to imagine and represent a better one.’
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. by Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester, 1973), pp. 138–9.
Margaret Maurer, ‘The Real Presence of Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the terms of John Donne’s “Honour is so Sublime Perfection”’, ELH, 47 (1980): 205–34, p. 214.
Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, p. 11. John Carey, ‘John Donne’s Newsless Letters’, in Essays and Studies, 34, ed. Anne Barton (1981): 45–65, pp. 54–5;
Claude Guillén, ‘Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1986): 70–101, p. 79, underestimates the complexity of Donne’s subject-matter in his verse letters to women.
R.C. Bald, Donne and the Drurys (Cambridge, 1959), p. 64, note *.
Anna Jameson, The Loves of the Poets (1829), I. ix.
John Donne, Pseudo-martyr (1610), p. 393.
John Donne, Biathanatos (1647), Preface.
For a discussion of Biathanatos within a Libertine tradition and also of its dissemination in the later seventeenth century, see George Williamson, ‘The Libertine Donne’, PQ 13 (1934): 276–91.
Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, Characters, Written by Dr. Donne (1652), p. 1.
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© 1997 Juliet Dusinberre
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Dusinberre, J. (1997). Virginia Woolf Reads John Donne. In: Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25644-0_3
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