John Donne

In the composition of his poetry, John Donne subverted the traditional rhetorical conventions which dictated the order of presentation of textual contents in both literary and non-literary discourse. Much of Donne's poetry is based on the organisation of a topic or argument by ...

O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar dados relevantes
acerca da vida do poeta inglês John Donne (1572-1631), bem como relacioná-
los com sua obra. Apresenta-se então a obra do poeta desde as Sátiras, obra
da juventude, até os Sermões, obra da maturidade artística, passando-se pela
poesia lírico-amorosa e religiosa. Na análise de algumas obras, destacam-se
os seus recursos estilísticos mais peculiares, como o “wit”. Por fim, ressaltase
a recepção que a obra – sobretudo poética – de Donne recebeu da posteridade,
especialmente no século XX.

Available at: https://www.mackseyjournal.org/publications/vol1/iss1/9

A corpus can mean both a human body and a body of writing, depending on how the reader encounters the word. The act of interpreting both kinds of corpora is, for many ancient and early modern thinkers, an active process that reveals, restricts, and reforms the reading and written self. In response to the question of the self’s legibility, this paper explores the metaphoricity of the self as a text, an idea rooted in the ancient hermeneutics of Augustine of Hippo, and prevalent in the early modern religious poetry of John Donne and John Milton. Surveying the multivalent interpretability of language and bodies throughout Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Milton’s Paradise Lost, juxtaposed with Augustine’s hermeneutics of the Biblical-textual self in the Confessions, this paper seeks to understand the limits of human intelligibility through the concept of the textual self which is both written and reading in relation to the divine. Symbolic and figurative reading practices, in tandem with theologies of original sin and fallenness, cultivate various interpretive models of legibility for these thinkers, figuring corpora as both texts and bodies that must be interpreted in order to access the innate nature of the human condition, circumscribed by unintelligible divinity.

A paper discussing the differing opinions on what denotes a piece of writing as being "literary", from a New Criticism perspective and that of reader-response theory. John Donne's 'Holy Sonnet XIV' and B. S. Johnson's 'A Few Selected Sentences' are used to demonstrate both sides of this much debated coin.

The imprint imagery is one of the most salient characters of Donne's poems; the paper explores the types and implications of the imagery not only in his poems, but also in his religious writings, to show that the imagery itself comes from Donne's  way of thinking about the world.

An essay for undergraduates and nonacademics looking at the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth through the figurative lenses of Steven Pinker's THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED (over human history) and "Kilgore Trout's" imagined short story "The Gospel from Outer Space."

Draws the political conclusion  that "Zealots, thugs, and assassins must be removed from society, maybe even killed. But in 2013 and following we should look back on the two criminals on the cross and resolve never again to torment a bum or torture even terrorists."

Embora o poeta inglês John Donne (1572-1631) seja mais
conhecido como poeta erótico do que como poeta religioso, a maior parte de
sua obra é composta por escritos religiosos, tanto em prosa quanto em verso.
No entanto, para compreender a obra religiosa de Donne devemos também
compreender uma série de questões teológicas que faziam parte das
discussões de seu tempo. Os Sonetos Sacros de John Donne são exemplares
quanto a essa necessidade. Partindo desse pressuposto, investigamos
sobretudo o “Soneto Sacro XIV” a fim de mostrarmos como a análise da
questão da Santíssima Trindade é imprescindível para a compreensão desse
poema e como ela se relaciona também com outros elementos religiosos da
obra donneana. Assim sendo, observamos que Donne não apenas se baseia
na tripartição da divindade em Pai, Filho e Espírito Santo para construir a
metáfora do poema, como também essa metáfora responde a outras
construções teológicas particulares a seu pensamento conforme expresso em
sua obra em prosa.

The full text is available here
http://kata.petra.ac.id/index.php/ing/article/view/18847

Death has always permeated human’s thoughts at all levels. This preoccupation with death is manifested in the realm of literature. John Donne is one of the artists whose obsession with death is universally recognized. The contemporary Iranian poet, Sohrab Sepehri in some of his poems employs the subject, too. Unlike Donne, Sepehri is not known as a ‘death poet.’ Although he lives in a turbulent period in the history of Iran, he is not influenced by his immediate condition. While the English poet is inconsistent in his treatment of death, Sepehri is consistent in his treatment of death. Sepehri’s consistency in the treatment of death has something to do with his religious beliefs. The reason behind Sepehri’s consistency in treating death as a positive phenomenon is his familiarity with the Islamic Sufism and eastern mysticisms.

Книга посвящена исследованимю отношений английской живописи второй половины XVI – начала XVII в. и английской культуры как  сложного целого. Восприятие культуры времен королевы Елизаветы I и короля Иакова IV требует внимания к самому духу времени, к идеям, что в ту пору «носились в воздухе» и составляли фон драм Шекспира и стихов Джона Донна, полотен Николаса Хилльярда и Джона Гувера.  Чтобы понять искусство той эпохи, необходимо погрузиться в ее теологические искания, политические диспуты, придворные интриги, литературные предпочтения, алхимические эксперименты и астрологические практики.
Автор использует большой массив теологической, социальной информации, создающий контекст, в котором только и можно «увидеть эпоху», обнаружить глубинные смыслы в портретах, мозаиках, гравюрах и эмблемах..

This paper argues that the recent trend in early modern studies occasionally referred to as the “new humoralism”, which lays heavy emphasis on the physiological and humoral significance of the emotions in seventeenth-century Renaissance literature, pays insufficient attention to the theological traditions of Christian humanism in the sixteenth century. In particular, the article traces a trajectory of the use of metaphors of clean versus muddy and calm versus turbulent water in Erasmus, John Calvin, John Donne and Edward Reynolds to illustrate the complexity of literary-theological discourse revolving around affectivity in sermons, treatises and biblical commentaries in the period, while simultaneously establishing the continuity of an exegetical tradition concerning Christ’s emotions.

“Seeing the Invisible Under the Microscope: Natural Philosophy and John Donne’s Flea” considers the mythological, poetic, and conceptual categories that influenced what the natural philosopher ostensibly “saw” under the lens. I argue that early microscopic texts, especially Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy, reveal a surprising indebtedness to fabular, fictional insects. Poetic fleas and their brethren, immortalized by John Donne but ubiquitous in classical and early modern works, were veritable workhouses of erotic, natural philosophical, and metaphysical speculation. Their miniscule size promised access to hidden knowledge, and their uncanny ontology led to analogies with other small entities like atoms and verses. I examine in turn the mutually reinforcing effects of microscopic oculus and poetic microcosm, showing how natural philosophy revels in imagination. These works of microscopy do study nature, but they also cite Donnean seduction poetry, recast insects as romancical characters, and reflect on nothingness.

One of the most intriguing studies of John Donne's poetry ever published was a book issued in 1967 by N. J. C. Andreasen. Titled John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary, this work argued that Donne was in his morality a conservative Christian but a revolutionary in his style of writing. Andreasen's approach helps to make Donne's career as a writer seem far more consistent, and far less confusing, than it can seem from the perspective of other points of view. How, readers of Donne often ask, could the writer of some of the most powerful religious poems in the English language also write poems that sometimes verge on pornography? How could he celebrate ideal Christian love in some poems and then express bold, bodily, merely physical eroticism in others? How could he write some poems in which women are treated with enormous respect and admiration and then also write other poems in which women seem to be sexually objectified, sometimes in very crude terms? Answers to these questions have been various. Some critics have argued that the Donne who wrote poems stressing mere physical appetite was the youthful Donne ("Jack Donne"), while the Donne who wrote poems celebrating genuine married love and mutual spiritual devotion was an older Donne, a more mature and spiritually committed individual. The problem with this response is that Donne wrote one of his most impassioned and philosophically serious defenses of Christianity and Christian morals ("Satire III") during the very same period when he was writing some of his most obviously explicit "pagan" poems. Another way of explaining Donne's apparent inconsistency is to assume that he wrote some poems with one audience in mind (for instance, an audience of randy young men) and other poems for a different, more deeply religious readership. But it would have been hard to keep these two kinds of audiences from finding out about one another and about the kinds of poems supposedly written only for each of them. Of course, there are other possible explanations as well, including these: (1) Donne was a hypocrite; (2) Donne was somewhat schizophrenic; (3) Donne never intended or claimed to be consistent; (4) Donne, as a talented poet and sophisticated thinker, was exploring and expressing a whole range of possible thoughts and feelings and felt no need to make them all conform to one another. Still, it is difficult to read "Satire III" and then turn, say, to the famously erotic (possibly pornographic) poem titled "To His Mistress Going to Bed" and try to understand how the same person could have written both poems, especially during roughly the same period of time. "Satire III" expresses deep and obvious commitment to the pursuit of spiritual truth; "To his Mistress" is full of jokes about male arousal, fantasies about sexual conquest, and a quite explicit focus mostly on one part of a woman's body, a part that the speaker says he wants to view as freely as a midwife might. The speaker's main interest is vigorous sexual activity, not deep spiritual union. Andreasen's book suggests various ways to make sense of this and other apparent contradictions in Donne's writing and thought. Essentially, Andreasen sees them not as contradictions at all. Instead, she thinks that in some poems (such as the Holy Sonnets and the obviously spiritual love poems), Donne was endorsing Christian morality in fairly explicit ways. And she thinks that in other poems-poems in which speakers seem to focus on merely physical eroticism-he was promoting Christian morality through the use of irony. Such irony, she thinks, would have been obvious to many Christian readers of his day. Donne, Andreasen suggests, often goes out of his way to include clues that the speakers of his blatantly erotic poems should not be taken seriously. In other words, Donne sometimes created speakers who, because of their almost exclusive focus on mere physical eroticism, would have been recognized as fools by sophisticated readers. He usually gives these

With Thomas Aquinas (and even more properly, Dante) as the "writer" of this book (the tale of St. Francis and Lady Poverty), the romancier of this roman, the potential for vice in the role of go-between, "galeotto," is transformed into an occasion for virtue. Chiarenza has said that the lines Francesca speaks are so full of the word "amor" that we do not see that they are "ultimately most impressive for the art with which they disguise carnality and violence as innocence and purity" (38). Dante reverses this art of masking so that innocence and purity are disguised as carnality and violence, and so that it is Thomas Aquinas who does the masking. What is the role of Thomas Aquinas in this poem? Giuseppe Mazzotta sees problems with the historical Thomas's rationalist sway: not adhering to Thomistic modes of analysis, "Dante redefines theology's scope and structure." This episode shows Dante supports Mazzotta's insight, but also that Dante wants to use Aquinas himself to accomplish this redefinition. Mazzotta states that the  "quest for the words of love is fleshed out as the love of the word" is most apropos. The tale of Francesco and Poverta counterbalances the tale of Francesca and Paolo that Dante may reveal the legitimate role of the love poet. It is not to vilify the gifts of the imagination, or even the enthusiasms of the only partially visionary audience. It tis -- and perhaps there is a moment of dantesque humor here as well -- Aquinas and to have him tell an absorbing story, and in describing a fact, to reveal a mystery. It is to make him make lovers who multiply love and in doing so (pace Shakespeare), to "o'erperch" the walls of the senseless cares of mortals with love's light wings.

My goal when publishing Sex & Fun in The Faerie Queene was to offer the reader what the poem is all about, without all that metaphysical and allegorical makeup. The poem is
about the Tudor succession, the Tudor dynasty and its continuation, thus preserving the unity of the nation. Books I and II form a pair, and then from Book III to Book V we see the evolution of Britomart, from a virgin to a woman, having met Arthegall and conceived a royal son (Book V, Canto 7, stanza 1-23). That son is the one we see in Book VI, Canto 2, hidden in the woods, Tristram. In Book VII, published in 1609 (as the Shake-speareʼs Sonnets) the author concluded the planetary week of the poem. Here it is a brief description of it all.

Bu araştırmada Metafizik Şairi John Donne’ye ait şiirlerdeki benzetme unsurlarının bir bölümü Klasik Türk Edebiyatı’na ait şiirlerde kullanılan benzetme ögeleriyle karşılaştırılmıştır. Karşılaştırma için John Donne’nin kullandığı benzetmelerin tespitinde özellikle Klasik Türk Şiiri’ndeki mazmun halinde kullanılmış olan benzetmelere yakınlık teşkil ettiği düşünülenler üzerinde durulmuş, bu noktadan hareketle Klasik Türk Şiirleri ve bu konuda hazırlanmış eserler ve makaleler taranmıştır. Karşılaştırma için menekşe, güneş, pervane, ah, girdap, kumru, titreme ve anasır-ı erbaa kavramları seçilmiştir. Bu karşılaştırma sonrasında kulanılan bazı benzetme ögelerinin ortaklık teşkil ettiği sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Ancak John Donne’ye ait şiirlerin temelinde cinsellik ve Hrisyitanlıkla ilgili semboller yatmakta Klasik Türk Şiiri’nin ise temelinde Tasavvufi ve İslamiyete ait semboller bulunmasından bu noktada aralarında önemli bir ayrışma olduğu tespit edilmiştir.

John Donne is a glorious forerunner of metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical poetry without Donne becomes misnomer. It is a special branch of intellect and emotion in a harmonic manner. Donne pioneered the style of metaphysical poetry by his poetic aptitude to associate the different aspects of nature and its constituents in a significant manner. He blended intellect and emotion, religion and passion, spiritualism and amorousness, and ingenious wit and caustic humor.

Metaphysical poetry resolved itself into two broad division, (i) love poetry and (ii) religious poetry. The habit of writing both typed of poetry, amorous and religious verses, is derived from Donne who wrote love poetry in the first period of his life and devotional in the later period, both with the same passion. Combination of religious spiritualism and erotic amorousness is a unique feature of Donne's poetry.

Donne's combination is truly remarkable. He oscillates between physical love and holy love. His treatment of love is realistic. He tries to establish the relationship between the body and the soul. True love does not pertain to the body; it is the mutual relationship of the two souls. His philosophy of love is like spiritual amorousness.

He sermons on love. He celebrates love as an alternative religion. To him, love is a holy passion, purging the lovers from baser things. As in GOOD MORROW, lovers' world is much higher and better than the world itself. There is no coldness, fear or decay. Love is eternal like spirit, which is neither subject to time or death. Mutual understanding of the loving souls will remain even, after death, in the heaven.

BATTER MY HEART-Holy Sonnet XIV- here Donne uses the tradition of Petrarchan love poetry for a religious end. He says he is married to God's "enemy" i.e. sin. In the sestet, a remarkable image of a lady who has been compelled to have relationship with an adversary of the lover, the God. Donne brings some paradoxical sensual imagery in the religious poem. The poet/she prays to the lover, the God, to force her separate from the devil she is betrothed to. He should save her by divorcing, imprisoning, embracing, rather ravishing. Like a lover's physical possession of beloved, God must also take possession of the poet. God's assault will make the poet chaste. Here religious spiritualism is expressed through erotic amorousness. Love is divine.

Donne celebrates the reverend love which becomes one another's hermitage, a haven of heavenly bliss and spiritual grace, and thereby transforming the ordinary lovers to the saints of love. Through the act of resembling the canonization of priest with the glorification of lovers, Donne has connected the sublime with the commonplace. Thus he combines amorousness and spirituality.

The CANONIZATION bestows a saintly grace to the earthly lovers. Here love is regarded as a holy emotion like the worship of a devotee of God. But the very poem starts in erotic tone-
"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,"
The love making poet asks his friend that he may compare the poet and his lover to anything ranging from fly to phoenix. The lovers want to renew their passion and their love life again like phoenix. "We die and rise the same." After showing* such passionate love, the poet compares their love to the saints' love for God. He also argues that the lovers should be canonized just as the God-loving saints.
Moreover in the poem, fly represents the shortness of life as well as sexual passion; on the other hand Phoenix is a religious image of immortal love. In such a subtle way, Donne brings physical love and spiritual love in a row.

In THE EXTASIE/ THE ECSTASY, the lovers are anointed by God. Their love is both physical and spiritual. Soul-love, by which vision of God can be achieved, produces ecstasy; it is a source of bodily affection simultaneously. So erotic love is mingled with spiritual love.  When a soul wishes to love another soul, it can contact only through the medium of the body. Donne says-
"Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book."
The body is the only and first agent of spiritual love. When their body meets, then their soul depart to meet each other spiritually. As a prince in prison cannot liberate himself without others' aid from outside. So the soul cannot free itself from the bodily prison without the help of sense and affection from a lover outside. This freedom and meeting of two loving souls create ecstasy.

[N.B.
Extasie is essentially a religious experience in which individual soul, ignoring the body, converse with divinity.
Canonization is the preservation of the ashes of great men in an ornamental urn or in tombs covering an area of a half acre. Miracle is necessary for a saint to be canonized.]

Una obra de traducción de los Sonetos Sacros de John Donne enmarcada en una narrativa ficticia sobre su traductor, su vida y su muerte en extrañas circunstancias, todo ello relatado por un académico prestigioso. La presencia de Nabokov en esta obra es evidente.

The aim of the B. A. thesis called “The poetry of John Donne: T.S.Eliot as Critic and Poet” is to analyse Eliot’s view of John Donne in relation to his own poetry and critical work. This is also reflected in the structure of the paper.
The first chapter following the introduction is devoted to the description of Eliot’s critical positions. The chapter should create a general background of the following discussion of Eliot’s view of John Donne. It deals with the issues like Eliot’s concept of tradition, the theory of depersonalization, Eliot’s attitude to the problem of Romanticism and Classicism, and his earlier account of metaphysical poetry.
The next chapter discusses Eliot’s specific view of John Donne on the bases of his definition of metaphysical poetry. At first, it sets the problems connected with the definition to a wider perspective of literary criticism. It shows that there are not only different interpretations of the phrase “metaphysical poetry,” but the critics differ in the answer to the question which particular poets should belong to this group. Eliot deals with this topic in his lectures on metaphysical poets collected under the title The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. In this material, we can trace two complementary definitions of metaphysical poetry. Eliot stresses that the term has a general value, and he speaks about three metaphysical periods which are represented by the work of Dante, Donne and Laforgue. He shows that there was always philosophy and mysticism in the background of each poet, and that it is a necessary prerequisite of their metaphysical quality. That is why the rest of the chapter describes the philosophical and mystical background of the poetry of John Donne. Donne is regarded as a man influenced by modern philosophy which was influenced by Jesuitism. Ignatian imaginative method of meditation stands also on the background of Donne’s mysticism.
The last chapter compares and contrasts Donne and Eliot in the perspective of Eliot’s idea of Donne’s peculiar type of metaphysical poetry. It includes concrete analyses of Donne’s and Eliot’s poems illustrating described relations. The first problem which the chapter deals with is the role of mysticism in metaphysical poetry in general and Donne’s and Eliot’s relation to the imaginative method of St.Ignatius. In a similar way, the paper compares and contrast Eliot’s and Donne’s philosophical background.
As a result of the whole paper, we can see an interesting connection between Eliot’s critical work and his poetry, and his reflection of the work of John Donne.

Целта на овој труд е да се разработат идеите и концептите со кои Џон Дан се служел во неговата поезија. Секако дека е тешко да се посочи на една конечна целина од карактеристики присутни во неговото творештво, но сепак веруваме дека малкумина не би се согласиле со изборот на оние седум кои укажуваат барем на јадрото од неговата поетска филозофија.
По краткиот вовед во животот на Џон Дан, како и околностите и авантурите што се преточиле во неговиот карактер, следува суштината од оваа обработка, што се состои од две по важност еднакви поглавја.
Првото поглавје е поделено на седум потпоглавја, што го означуваат нашиот избор од седум карактеристики со кои е обоена поезијата на Џон Дан. Тоа се: соодветност на поетски слики, јазик, страст, остроумност и дијалектика, парадокс, имагинација и, на крај, мисловна бравура изразена низ продолжена споредба што се граничи со метафора (conceit). Методата со која го воведуваме читателот во овие идеи и концепти е со дефинирање на истите, користејќи стихови земени од целокупното поетско творештво на Џон Дан, а потоа со цел тие да се опишат и истакнат, во ова поглавје се наведени извадоци од голем број песни како соодветни примери.
Во вториот дел, пак, наместо споменатите идеи и концепти да се дефинираат, нив ги детектираме во една песна, а патем ќе се обидеме и да укажеме како таа ја одразува суштината на поетската филозофија на Џон Дан и на неговото поетско битие. Обработката на оваа песна, под наслов “A Nocturnal upon S. Lucies day, being the shortest day”, не цели кон објаснување на концептите и ставовите на Џон Дан, туку служи само како помагало за изразување на нашите погледи и ставови кон нив.
Во заклучокот на овој труд уште еднаш накратко ја истакнуваме причината за нашиот избор. Притоа ја нагласуваме улогата што Џон Дан ја играл во ревидирањето на поезијата во неговото време и популарноста која тој тогаш ја уживал. На крај го потенцираме влијанието на неговите поетски иновации врз целокупната современа литература.

Ver, begin by Ricardo Mena will be recognized as a milestone on the path toward understanding the Elizabethan age and the phenomenon of “Shakespeare” … Here is the most complete, most in-depth rendering to date of the biographical and historical truths that have remained hidden beneath the Shakespeare myth … Ricardo Mena takes us on a guided tour to the otherwise invisible heart of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras; and let it be proclaimed that no previous scholar, no researcher, no author before now has dared to travel so far beneath the surface of the recorded history and the surviving literature. No one till now has maintained the clarity of vision that is shared with us in the following pages.

The result is an unprecedented synthesis of various strands of evidence, all woven into a grand sweep of narrative that spans the golden age of the English Renaissance, informing us about our own history and about the forces that have helped to shape our current civilization ... The debates over “Shakespeare” that begun in the 1800s and continued all through the twentieth century are now bearing fruit; and Ver, begin marks the first real attempt to construct (or reconstruct) the full story, integrating all its pieces so they fit together and make sense, even as each aspect sheds new light on the others. This book is about not only knowing the truth, but, in the end, about understanding it.—Hank Whittemore, author of The Monument and Shakespeare's Son and his Sonnets, quoted from the Foreword of Ver, begin.



The lengthy volume ... is memorable for something yet more ad hoc: its vital energy, freedom of thought, and imaginativeness to rearrange pieces previously frozen on the Elizabethan chessboard. This makes for an intellectual wild ride ... Several monographs twine together in a single revolutionary epic ... In short, the book is an achievement. Perhaps just because of its driving, prolix, protean character, wherein discoveries fly out like sparks along the way, the reader sees a new perspective on the age that reaches beyond the Oxford-centered understanding. With that flair, I expect it will be picked up by a commercial publisher, Spanish or English. Ricardo Mena’s website contains some of the liveliest literary commentaries available on the Internet ... Santayana’s morality lies back of the work, that skepticism is wholesome, that thinkers must not surrender lightly the duty of independent thought. This principled attitude, far from being contentious, imbues the book’s literary criticism with positive rather than adversarial light. Ver, begin is a spiritual advance upon much invective and polemic that have gone before.—William J. Ray, peer review on Ver, begin, the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter (Vol. 51 Summer 2015).

The Faerie Queene was written by John Donne with the pseudonym "Edmund Spenser" (as stated in Ver, begin, 2015). In this new work I offer a synthesis of DINS theory and a review of this epic poem in a burlesque style, rather Nashe-like. As was defended by Fowler, Evans and many others, the epic poem is finished, but imperfect.