Donne and the Reign of Figures

Abstract

John Donne wrote poetry at the heart of a world of ideal constructions—including good measures, good love, great faith—that are no longer readily supported in the modern age of deconstruction. Whereas Shakespeare’s plays, works of genius that they are and requiring conflict as they do, anticipate the doubts and turbulence of twentieth-century poetry, Donne held steady to a secure set of ideas and positions that were the standard properties of his age, and made great work out of them. (He would have been an astonishing poet in any age.) He had a particular genius for dramatistic voice (that which obviously distinguishes Shakespeare’s plays but is subdued in his sonnets)—,for drama in the midst of a nonetheless unusually reasoning and frequently songful poetry. His strongest performances can be said to consist of uniquely vivid types of speech-figures, stanzaic figures, and figures of speech, especially metaphors, which were not ornaments to his thought but their very axis