Abstract
John Donne’s passion for reason and witty analysis was matched only by his desire to experience immediate self-fulfillment and inner harmony. The manner in which his poetry reflects both of these preoccupations was greatly influenced by his acute awareness of decaying symbolizations and lost unity. In his poetry, which ranges over a period of approximately 35 years, we see a restless, probing imagination trying to come to grips with itself and with its collapsing heritage. Although as a thinker Donne was neither a revolutionary nor a visionary,1 as a poet his acute awareness of what Marjorie Nicolson has called “the breaking of the circle” 2 enabled him to create some of the wittiest, most ironic lyrics of his time, and in the end to transform this witty mode from one of irony to one of affirmation. His latest poems embody a poetic-religious vision of the paradoxical self as the center of a human community whose dimensions are at once historical and mythic.
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References
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” on Seventeenth-Century Poetry, rev. ed. (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1962).
In general, I am accepting Helen Gardner’s chronology as outlined in her edition of The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. xvii-lxii. All textual citations come from this edition of Donne’s love poetry.
Our discussion of Donne’s religious poetry will be based on the text in Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: The Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
The edition we are using is Frank Manley, ed., John Donne: The Anniversaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963).
Any reference to the categories of “sacred” and “profane” are based on the work of Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1959).
Helen Gardner elucidates these poetic commonplaces, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, pp. 198–99.
Richard E. Hughes, The Progress of the Soul; The Interior Career of John Donne (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1968), pp. 115–16.
See especially Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation; A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New York & London: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 211–16.
Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’Amore, cited in A. J. Smith, “The Metaphysic of Love,” RES, IX (1958), 365.
Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsman; an Essay upon the Structure of the “Songs and Sonnets” (Paris: Didier, 1928).
A. J. Smith, “The Metaphysic of Love,” p. 375. This excellent article analyzes “The Exstasie” in the context of sixteenth-century theories of love, demonstrating the essential banality of the poem’s themes and the inordinate wit with which they are ordered and intertwined.
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn; Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947), p. 11.
A. J. Smith, p. 364, notes that many theorists, Tullia among them, “held that in good love the very physical appetite might increase by what it fed on, seeking bodily union all the more ardently for the pleasure once proved.”
Donald Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist; Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in The Songs and Sonnets (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), pp. 159–62.
Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 132.
John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 402.
For a thorough analysis of this poem’s imagery, see A. J. Smith, “New Bearings in Donne: ‘Air and Angels,’” English, XIII (1960), reprinted in John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Helen Gardner (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962).
See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1947), pp. 175–86.
Sir Edmund William Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (London: W. Heineman, 1899), Vol. I, p. 191.
Helen Gardner dates “A Litanie” in Autumn, 1608, and suggests July, 1607, for “La Corona (John Donne: The Divine Poems, pp. 57 and 81). “The Crosse” is probably early also, as is “Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day, 1608.”
Helen Gardner A Litanie 1608Ibid., p. xxii.
Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia epidemica, p. 138.
John Donne: Devotions upon emergent occasions: Together with Death’s Duel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 25.
Probably in 1611 and 1612. See Frank Manley, ed., John Donne: The Anniversaries, “Introduction,” section V.
Ibid., p. 48.
As is well known, Elizabeth’s father, Sir Robert Drury, was Donne’s patron.
Frank Manley, SCN, XVII (1959), p. 26. For a detailed discussion of “shee” as Wisdom, see Manley’s introduction to the Anniversaries, pp. 10–50. The other interpretations can be found in Marius Bewley, “Religious Cynicism in Donne’s Poetry,” Kenyon Review, XIV (1952), 619–46; Marjorie Nicolson, Breaking of the Circle, pp. 81–122;
William Empson, English Pastoral Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), p. 84; Louis Martz, Poetry of Meditation, p. 226.
Manley, The Anniversaries, p. 10.
Donne does not necessarily accept the “new philosophy” intellectually, but imaginatively. Its images serve his purposes and bear witness to his main thesis that earth and heaven have been disjointed and continue to grow farther apart. Studies such as Charles Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New York, 1938), which consider the impact of scientific rationalism to be the dominant theme of the Anniversaries, are therefore somewhat misleading. The “new philosophy” provides just another example of the conflicting, broken symbolizations experienced by Donne.
Op. cit., p. 18.
Examples: SA 7–21, 157–74, 303–10, 339–58.
A. B. Chambers, “‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’: The Poem and the Tradition,” ELH, XXVIII (1961), 50.
A. B. Chambers, “‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’: The Poem and the Tradition (1961), 50Ibid.
Chambers, p. 52.
It was written either in 1623 or 1630. Helen Gardner, The Divine Poems, pp. 132–35, discusses at length the problem of dating this poem.
Gardner, The Divine Poems, pp. 135–37, devotes an appendix to the interpretation of “Paradise and Calvarie” in this poem. However, her exceedingly scholarly comments are unable to explain the symbolism involved because she misses the sacred reality of time and space as they appear here.
LXXX Sermons, xxvii, 268; cited in Gardner, p. 108.
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Altizer, A.B. (1973). John Donne. In: Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne and Agrippa D’Aubigne. Archives Internationales D’histoire des Idees / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2459-4_3
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