John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays

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I found parts this valuable book. I will post the whatever is available now. then try to post the remaining pages soon when i find them.

If you like an article, follow it here

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6002178
John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays
Book by Helen Gardner; Prentice-Hall, 1961. 186 pgs.

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION -- Helen Gardner...............................1
JOHN DONNE -- George Saintsbury ............................... 13
DONNES LOVE-POETRY -- Herbert J. C. Grierson ............................... 23
THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN DONNE'S POETRY --
Pierre Legouis .................................................. ............ 36
"A VALEDICTION: OF WEEPING" -- William Empson ............................... 52
DONNE'S RELATION TO THE POETRY OF HIS TIME --
Mario Praz .................................................. ........................................... 61
JOHN DONNE: A RECONSIDERATION -- J. E. V. Crofts ............................... 77
DONNE AND LOVE POETRY IN THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY -- C. S. Lewis .................................................. ............90
THE LANGUAGE OF PARADOX: "THE CANONIZATION" --
Cleanth Brooks .................................................. ............ 100
DONNE AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POETRY --
J. B. Leishman .................................................. ............ 109
THE RELIGIOUS POETRY OF JOHN DONNE --
Helen Gardner .................................................. ............ 123
THE LITERARY VALUE OF DONNE'S SERMONS --
Evelyn M. Simpson .................................................. ............ 137
JOHN DONNE IN MEDITATION -- Louis L. Martz ...............................152
NEW BEARINGS IN DONNE: "AIR AND ANGELS" --
A. J. Smith .................................................. ............ 171
Chronology of Important Dates .................................................. ............ 180
Notes on the Editor and the Authors ............................... 181
Selected Bibliography .................................................. ............ 182
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Publication Information: Book Title: John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Contributors: Helen Gardner - editor. Publisher: Prentice-Hall. Place of Publication: Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Publication Year: 1961. Page Number: v.

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Introduction
by Helen Gardner

The essays collected here cover the years from 1896 to 1960 and
include the years entre deux guerres during which Donne enjoyed a
higher reputation and a greater popularity than at any time since the
thirty years following the first publication of his poems. An older reader
of these essays, aware of this as a fact of his own experience, may well
feel puzzled at the absence of any essay in which the case for regarding
Donne as providing a "norm" of excellence in English poetry is argued.
He will find a certain number of essays in which this point of view is being
contested and he may well ask who were the writers and critics whose
extravagant praise J. E. V. Crofts and C. S. Lewis are attempting to
correct, and where, if not here, can he find essays which will sum up the
intense enthusiasm for Donne's poetry which the young of both sexes felt
in the Twenties and Thirties of this century. I must own that I have been
surprised at the difficulty of finding any essay in which this view is argued
at length, rather than taken for granted or opposed. I had not realized,
until I came to make this collection, that I should find little beyond
scattered sentences and odd paragraphs to support the statement that
from 1921, the year of Mr. T. S. Eliot's review of Grierson's anthology
of metaphysical poetry, to the middle Forties it was largely taken for
granted among literary persons, by many university teachers, and, I
should say, by the majority of undergraduates that Donne was a more
interesting and significant poet than Milton, and that in him English
poetry reached a kind of high-water mark. To print a volume of
twentieth century essays on Donne in which this view is not fully repre-
sented seems like presenting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. I
can only assure my readers that it is not the result of a deliberate policy
of exclusion, but of my failure to discover a worthy written monument
of what memory tells me was a pervasive "orthodox" view. 1

It was held equally strongly that Donne's greatness was a discovery of
the twentieth century after over two hundred years of neglect. Here again,
although scholarship can correct the view that Donne was unread in the

____________________
1 For an extended discussion of changes in the reputation of Donne see Joseph E. Duncan
, The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry ( University of Minnesota Press, 1959).

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John Donne
by George Saintsbury
There is hardly any, perhaps indeed there is not any, English author
on whom it is so hard to keep the just mixture of personal appreciation
and critical measure as it is on John Donne. It is almost necessary that
those who do not like him should not like him at all; should be scarcely
able to see how any decent and intelligent human creature can like
him. It is almost as necessary that those who do like him should either
like him so much as to speak unadvisedly with their lips, or else curb and
restrain the expression of their love for fear that it should seem on that
side idolatry. But these are not the only dangers. Donne is eminently of
that kind which lends itself to sham liking, to coterie worship, to a false
enthusiasm; and here is another weapon in the hands of the infidels, and
another stumbling-block for the feet of the true believers. Yet there is
always something stimulating in a subject of this kind, and a sort of
temptation to attempt it. . . .

The circumstances of his life do not greatly concern us here; nor does
that part--an eminent and admirable part--of his work which is not in
verse. But it does concern us that there is a strange, though by no means
unexampled, division between the two periods of his life and the two
classes of his work. Roughly speaking, almost the whole of at least the
secular verse belongs to the first division of the life, almost the whole
of the prose to the second. Again, by far the greater part of the verse is
animated by what may be called a spiritualized worldliness and sensuality,
the whole of the prose by a spiritualism which has left worldliness far
behind. The conjunction is, I say, not unknown: it was specially prevalent
in the age of Donne's birth and early life. It has even passed into some-

____________________
"John Donne." Preface by George Saintsbury to The Poems of John Donne, edited
by E. K. Chambers, 2 vols. ( London, 1896). Reprinted in G. Saintsbury, Prefaces and
Essays ( London, 1933). Reprinted by permission of Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
[A summary account of Donne's life, now seriously out-of-date, has been omitted
between the first and second paragraphs. Saintsbury's quotations are from Chambers'
text ( The Muses' Library) which followed the second edition of Donne's poems ( 1635)
and modernized the spelling. They differ, therefore, from quotations in the majority
of the essays that follow which are taken from Grierson's text ( 1912), based on the
first edition ( 1633) and preserving its spelling. Ed.
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Donne's Love-Poetry
by Herbert J. C. Grierson

Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon. The two
dominant strains in it are these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play of
argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid realism,
the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional, neither recol-
lected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary fashion, but love
as an actual, immediate experience in all its moods, gay and angry, scorn-
ful and rapturous with joy, touched with tenderness and darkened with
sorrow--though these last two moods, the commonest in love-poetry, are
with Donne the rarest. The first of these strains comes to Donne from
the Middle Ages, the dialectic of the Schools, which passed into mediaeval
love-poetry almost from its inception; the second is the expression of the
new temper of the Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin
countries. Donne uses the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-
poets, the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and
their successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of their canzoni,
but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception of love which
are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The result, however, is
not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope seems to think: "This
fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished in the poetry of Donne. To
him love, in its infinite variety and inconsistency, represented the prin-
ciple of perpetual flux in nature." 1 The truth is rather that, owing to the
fullness of Donne's experience as a lover, the accident that made of the
earlier libertine a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his
restless and subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and
realized in this less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the sug-
gestion of a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than

____________________
"Donne's Love-Poetry." From an Introductory Essay on "The Poetry of Donne"
in The Poems of John Donne, edited by Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. ( London,
1912), vol. ii, pp. xxxiv-xlix. Reprinted by permission of The Clarendon Press.
1 History of English Poetry ( London, 1903), iii. 54. Mr. Courthope qualifies this
statement somewhat on the next page: "From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was
perhaps reclaimed by genuine love," and so on. But he has, I think, insufficiently
analyzed the diverse strains in Donne's love-poetry.
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someona will need this

The Dramatic Element in Donne's Poetry
by Pierre Legouis

That Donne possessed dramatic power has generally been acknowl-
edged. 1 Indeed, one of the generation that came to manhood in the last
decade of the sixteenth century might be credited with some measure of
the instinct at work in Shakespeare and so many lesser playwrights, even
before he had given evidence of it. In his fervid youth Donne was "a
great Frequenter of Plays," 2 though the theaters probably found in him

____________________
"The Dramatic Element in Donne's Poetry." From Donne the Craftsman, by Pierre Legouis
( Paris, 1928). Reprinted by permission of the author. [The pages reprinted
(pp. 47 - 61 and 71 -9) form the third section of Professor Legouis' defence of Donne as
an artist. They omit his interpretation of "The Ecstasy" as a dramatic poem. This has,
given rise to so much controversy that to reprint it would have necessitated printing
rebuttals. For a summary of the debate, see my article "The Argument about 'The
Ecstasy,'" Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies, edited by Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner
( Oxford, 1959). Professor Legouis approves this omission and has also kindly
supplied me with some corrections and minor alterations of the text for this reprint.
Ed.]

1 Edward Dowden, New Studies in Literature ( London, 1895), p. 103, goes near to
denying it: "Touches of dramatic power are rare in Donne, whose genius was lyrical
and meditative, not that of a dramatist; but in this Elegy ["By our first strange and
fatall interview . . ."] there is one touch which might seem of triumphant power even
if it had occurred in a tragedy of Webster." The remark applies to ll. 50-54; when I
am gone on my continental journey, the lover says to his mistress, do not
in bed fright thy Nurse
With midnight startings, crying out, oh oh,
Nurse, ô my love is slaine, I saw him goe
O'r the white Alps alone; I saw him I,
Assail'd, fight, taken, stabb'd, bleed, fall and die.

The passage is very beautiful and moving but it is not strictly dramatic since the lover
merely conjures up a vision of the future as in "The Apparition" (see infra).

2 Sir Richard Baker, Chronicle of the Kings of England ( 1730), p. 424, quoted in
Grierson, Poems, ii. 172. Grierson also quotes a verse letter, addressed to Donne c. 1600
by "William Cornwaleys," which contains the lines:
If then for change of howers you seem careles,
Agree with me to lose them at the playes.

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A Valediction: of Weeping"
by William Empson

"A Valediction: of Weeping" weeps for two reasons, which may not
at first sight seem very different; because their love when they are together,
which they must lose, is so valuable, and because they are "nothing' when
they are apart. There is none of the Platonic pretense Donne keeps up
elsewhere, that their love is independent of being together; he can find no
satisfaction in his hopelessness but to make as much of the actual situa-
tion of parting as possible; and the language of the poem is shot through
with a suspicion which for once he is too delicate or too preoccupied to
state unambiguously, that when he is gone she will be unfaithful to him.
Those critics who say the poem is sincere, by the way, and therefore must
have been written to poor Anne, * know not what they do.

Let me powre forth
My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stampe they beare,
And by this Mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee,

Fruits of much grief they are, emblemes of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falst which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore. 1

"Allow me this foolishness; let me cry thoroughly while I can yet see your
face, because my tears will be worth nothing, may, in fact, not flow at all,

____________________
"'A Valediction: of Weeping.'" From Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson
, 3rd edition, revised ( London, 1953: reprinted 1956), pp. 139-148. Copyright 1930 by
Chatto and Windus, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author, Chatto and Windus,
and New Directions. [The chapter from which this passage is excerpted deals with
"a fourth type" of ambiguity which "occurs when two or more meanings of a statement
do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state
of mind in the author." Ed.]
* [ Professor Empson asks me to add here that he now thinks that "the poem may
have been written to Donne's wife, because the ironies are not against the woman
addressed but against his own previous uses of the fantastic argument." He wishes
readers to be referred to his article "Donne the Spaceman," Kenyon Review, 1957. Ed.]
1 The three verses of the poem are quoted and examined separately.
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Donne's Relation to
the Poetry of His Time
by Mario Praz

There are few themes more harped on by sixteenth century poets than
the time-honored one of the love-dream. Its formula, as it was broadcast
throughout Europe by the Italian sonneteers, amounted to this: the poet
dreams that his cruel beloved has relented and comes to solace him, but
just when he is about to enjoy this godsend, sleep forsakes him. This
being the bare outline, one was left an extensive choice of trimmings.
You could start with a brief and elegant description of night, or with
a complaint addressed to Sleep, or with a cry of joy: "Is this the fair
hair . . . ?" combined with the usual Petrarchan description of the lady;
if you were at pains how to fill up the quatrains, mythology came to your
rescue, with Morpheus, Endymion and Diana, Ixion, and similar pleasant
purple patches; or you could quibble on the disappearance of the sun,
and the rise of that other sun, the beloved, in the dead of night. When,
in the eighties of the sixteenth century, Thomas Watson picked up (from
the Latin poems of Hercules Strozza) "this kinde of invention . . . usuall
among those that have excelled in the sweetest vaine of Poetrie," he set
out with a mythological embroidery on the circumstances of his dream:

In Thetis lappe, while Titan tooke his rest,
I slumbring lay within my restless bedde,
Till Morpheus us'd a falsed soary jest,
Presenting her, by whom I still am ledde:
For then I thought she came to ende my wo,
But when I wakt (alas) t'was nothing so.

Alas, vain hope! Like Ixion's

____________________
"Donne's Relation to the Poetry of His Time." Originally contributed by Mario Praz
to A Garland for John Donne, edited by Theodore Spencer ( Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1931); revised and enlarged for inclusion in The Flaming
Heart, by Mario Praz ( New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958). Copyright © 1958
by Mario Praz. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Harvard University
Press.
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John Donne: a Reconsideration
by J. E. V. Crofts

Donne came of age in 1593, at that uncomfortable moment when the
gale of Elizabethan enthusiasm had nearly blown itself out and a chill
was in the air. He was in time to take part in the last "heroick" exploit
of the age, the capture of Cadiz ( 1596); but in the next year its glories
were effaced by the miserable Islands Voyage and the outbreak of those
open factions and animosities which darkened the remaining years of
the reign. It was the age of Hamlet: indeed, if we suppose Hamlet to
have been thirty at the date of the play, Donne was exactly his con-
temporary. "This goodly frame, the Earth, seemes to me a sterrill Prom-
ontory; this most excellent Canopy the Ayre. . . . why, it appeares no
other thing to mee, then a foule and pestilent congregation of vapours."
No more of Petrarch now; no more talk of Plato and the Divine Idea.
The smart young man now plucked his hat over his eyes; wrote gritty
satires in a Roman vein; and joined that School of Darkness presided
over by Raleigh, where fierce young atheists read papers questioning and
abolishing everything under the sun. Gloriana still reigned; and in
districts remote from the capital the horns of her Elfland were still to be
heard faintly blowing; but in London the pageant was paling under the
light of an intellectual dawn, and her surviving knights and seneschals
were revealed as a group of tired and pouchy-faced old men standing
about the throne of a dreadfully painted old woman. Even the most
radiant stars of her legend were losing their fire: even Astrophel, it was
said, had been "no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoilt
with pimples." 1 And into this scene of disillusionment and dwindling

____________________
"John Donne: A Reconsideration." (Original title: "John Donne.") Contributed by
J. E. V. Crofts to Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. xxii
( Oxford, 1937). Reprinted by permission of the author. [ Professor Crofts's quotations
from Donne's poems are mainly taken from E. K. Chambers' text (The Muses' Library,
1896), but he does not follow its punctuation exactly and at times appears to be
quoting from memory. Ed.]

1 Jonson, "Conversations with Drtimmond," Works, ed. Herford and Simpson, vol. i
( Oxford, 1925), p. 139.
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Donne and Love Poetry
in the Seventeenth Century
by C. S. Lewis

The great central movement of love poetry, and of fiction about love,
in Donne's time is that represented by Shakespeare and Spenser. This
movement consisted in the final transmutation of the mediaeval courtly
love or romance of adultery into an equally romantic love that looked to
marriage as its natural conclusion. The process, of course, had begun
far earlier--as early, indeed, as the Kingis Quhair--but its triumph be-
longs to the sixteenth century. It is most powerfully expressed by Spenser,
but more clearly and philosophically by Chapman in that underestimated
poem, his Hero and Leander. These poets were engaged, as Professor
Vinaver would say, in reconciling Carbonek and Camelot, virtue and
courtesy, divine and human love; and incidentally in laying down the
lines which love-poetry was to follow till the nineteenth century. We who
live at the end of the dispensation which they inaugurated and in reac-
tion against it are not well placed for evaluating their work. Precisely
what is revolutionary and creative in it seems to us platitudinous, ortho-
dox, and stale. If there were a poet, and a strong poet, alive in their
time who was failing to move with them, he would inevitably appear to
us more "modern" than they.

But was Donne such a poet? A great critic has assigned him an almost
opposite role, and it behoves us to proceed with caution. It may be ad-
mitted at once that Donne's work is not, in this respect, all of a piece;
no poet fits perfectly into such a scheme as I have outlined--it can be
true only by round and by large. There are poems in which Donne
attempts to sing a love perfectly in harmony with the moral law, but
they are not very numerous and I do not think they are usually his best
pieces. Donne never for long gets rid of a mediaeval sense of the sinful-
ness of sexuality; indeed, just because the old conventional division be-

____________________
"Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century." The latter part of an essay
contributed by C. S. Lewis to Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert
Grierson ( Oxford, 1938), pp. 73-84. Reprinted by permission of the author and The
Clarendon Press. [For a modification of the views expressed here, see C. S. Lewis,
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century ( Oxford, 1954), pp. 546-551. Ed.]
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The Language of Paradox:
"The Canonization"
by Cleanth Brooks

Even the apparently simple and straightforward poet is forced into
paradoxes by the nature of his instrument. Seeing this, we should not
be surprised to find poets who consciously employ it to gain a compres-
sion and precision otherwise unobtainable. Such a method, like any
other, carries with it its own perils. But the dangers are not overpowering;
the poem is not predetermined to a shallow and glittering sophistry. The
method is an extension of the normal language of poetry, not a perversion
of it.

I should like to refer the reader to a concrete case. Donne "Canoniza-
tion" ought to provide a sufficiently extreme instance.

For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love
Or chide my palsie, or my gout,
My five gray haires, or ruin'd fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who saies my teares have overflow'd his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veines fill
Adde one more to the plaguie Bill?
Soldiers finde warres, and Lawyers finde out still

____________________
"The Language of Paradox: 'The Canonization.'" Part of the first chapter of The
Well Wrought Urn, by Cleanth Brooks ( New York, 1947; London, 1949). Copyright
1947 by Cleanth Brooks. Reprinted by permission of the author, Harcourt, Brace and
World, Inc., and Dennis Dobson.

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Donne and Seventeenth Century Poetry
by J. B. Leishman

In the historical consideration of literature there are three dangers
against which we should be continually on our guard: the danger that
we may lose sight of the larger differences and distinctions through
concentrating too much attention upon the subsidiary ones; the danger
that we may pervert these subsidiary distinctions into antitheses; the
danger that within these subsidiary distinctions we may insist too much
upon identity and too little upon difference. In the present field of
study we have, on the one hand, heard perhaps too much of a School
of Jonson and a School of Donne, of the classical and the so-called
metaphysical strains in seventeenth century poetry, and not enough of
those larger differences between the characteristic nondramatic poetry
of the Age of Elizabeth and that of the Jacobean and Caroline periods,
differences in which both Jonson and Donne equally share; while on
the other hand, we have had, perhaps, too many generalizations about
the so-called metaphysical poets and not enough insistence on the very
important differences between them. It is, indeed, easier to perceive
certain obvious differences between the poetry of Donne and Jonson
than to perceive certain important resemblances, just as it is easier to
perceive certain superficial resemblances between, say, Donne and Crashaw
than to become aware of their fundamental differences. The ultimate
purpose of such generalizations, classifications, and distinctions is to
increase awareness, to enable us, by analysis and comparison, to achieve
a clearer recognition, a more intense appreciation, of the peculiar virtue,
the essential thisness, of whatever literature we may be studying; this,
though, is a strenuous task, and most of us, I fear, tend unconsciously to
manipulate these generalizations, classifications, and distinctions, dis-
regarding here, overemphasizing there, until we have spread over every-

____________________
"Donne and Seventeenth Century Poetry." Chapter I of The Monarch of Wit, by
J. B. Leishman, 5th edition, revised ( London , 1962). Copyright 1951 by Hutchinson's
University Library. Reprinted by permission of the author, the Hutchinson Publish-
ing Group, and Hillary House Publishers, Ltd. [With the author's approval the foot-
notes have been reduced. Ed.]
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The Religious Poetry of John Donne
by Helen Gardner

With the probable exception of "The Cross," for which no precise
date can be suggested, and which is more a verse-letter than a divine
poem, the earliest of Donne's Divine Poems appears to be "La Corona."
"La Corona" is a single poem, made up of seven linked sonnets, each of
which celebrates not so much an event in the life of Christ as a mystery
of faith. Those brought up in a different tradition might well wonder
why Donne should devote one sonnet of his seven to the Finding in the
Temple, and omit all reference to the events of the Ministry, except for
a brief reference to miracles. The emphasis on the beginning and close
of the life of Christ is characteristic of mediaeval art, whether we think
of a series of windows like those at Fairford, or of the mediaeval dramatic
cycles. It was dictated by the desire to present with simplicity the Christian
scheme of man's redemption. The popular devotional equivalent of this
emphasis upon the plan of salvation was the meditation on the Fifteen
Mysteries of the Rosary, and reference to them explains at once why
Donne would find it natural to pass directly from the Finding in the
Temple to the events of Holy Week. 1 Habits of prayer, like other early
habits, can survive modifications of a man's intellectual position. It is
doubtful whether Donne felt there was anything particularly Catholic in
concentrating on the Mysteries of the Faith, or in addressing his second
and third sonnets to the Blessed Virgin, or in apostrophizing St. Joseph
in his fourth; but it is also doubtful whether anyone who had been
brought up as a Protestant would have done so.

"La Corona" has been undervalued as a poem by comparison with the

____________________
"The Religious Poetry of John Donne." From Part I of the General Introduction to
The Divine Poems of John Donne, edited by Helen Gardner ( Oxford, 1952), pp.
xxi-xxxvii. Reprinted by permission of The Clarendon Press. [Some footnotes have
been omitted. Ed.]

1 The Joyful Mysteries are the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, Find-
ing in the Temple; the Sorrowful Mysteries are the Agony, Scourging, Crowning with
Thorns, Bearing of the Cross, Crucifixion; the Glorious Mysteries are the Resurrection,
Ascension, Coming of the Holy Ghost, Assumption, Coronation. Donne's "rectified devo-
tion" naturally omits the last two, which have no basis in Scripture.
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i need to read this



The Literary Value of Donne's Sermons
by Evelyn M. Simpson

John Donne was essentially a poet. It is as a poet, primarily, that
he holds and will continue to hold his place in English literature. But in
the later years of his life his creative power had to express itself for the
most part in "that other harmony of prose." To his contemporaries it
would have seemed hardly fitting that a Dean of St. Paul's should spend
his time in idle versemaking. Occasionally the poetic impulse was too
strong for him, and he composed one of his great sonnets or hymns, but
for most of his time he labored in his vocation of preaching, and in this
way he produced his finest prose.

Prose was a medium of literary expression which he had already used
in the Paradoxes and Problems, Biathanatos, Ignatius his Conclave, and
Essays in Divinity. He became an artist in prose as well as in verse. He had
the poet's feeling for the color and sound of words, and the instinct for
the right word in the right place. He was able to please, or surprise, or
shock, in prose as he had done in verse. His prose lacks something of the
concentrated intensity of his verse, it is true. Prose by its very nature tends
to be more diffuse than poetry, and less individual. Yet Donne's prose
conveys to us the unmistakable flavor of the man's personality, and the
study of it is an exciting experience.

In prose Donne belongs to the school of Hooker and Jeremy Taylor,
of Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Like them he had been trained to
write Latin prose, and he carried into his writing of his native language
that mastery of the long period, that control of subordinate clauses, which
is one of the marks of a Latin stylist. His greatest effects, such as that at
the close of the terrible and majestic passage on damnation, are obtained
by the marshaling of clause on clause, till the climax comes like a peal
of thunder.

Donne did not attain at once to this mastery of the long period. One of
his early attempts in prose, the "Character of a Dunce," consists of one

____________________
"The Literary Value of Donne's Sermons." Contributed by Evelyn M. Simpson as
Section IV of the General Introduction to The Sermons of John Donne, edited by
George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson ( University of California Press, 1953-1962), vol.
i ( 1953), pp. 83 -4, 88 - 103. Copyright 1953 by the Regents of the University of California.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the Regents of the University of California.

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John Donne in Meditation
by Louis L. Martz

The Anniversaries are not usually treated as whole poems. For one
thing, the biographical facts underlying these poems lead readers to
approach them with suspicion, since they were written in memory of the
daughter of Donne's generous patron, Sir Robert Drury--a girl who died
in her fifteenth year, and whom Donne admits he never saw. 1 As a result,
the elaborate eulogies of Elizabeth Drury are frequently dismissed as
venal and insincere, while interest in the poems centers on those passages
which reflect Donne's awareness of the "new philosophy," on explicitly
religious portions, or on any portions which provide illustrative quotations
for special studies of Donne and his period.

Such fragmentary appreciation of the poems has, I think, hampered an
understanding of their full significance. For each poem is carefully de-
signed as a whole, and the full meaning of each grows out of a deliberately
articulated structure. Furthermore, a close reading of each poem shows
that the two Anniversaries are significantly different in structure and in
the handling of Petrarchan imagery, and are consequently different in
value. The First Anniversary, despite its careful structure, is, it must be
admitted, successful only in brilliant patches; but I think it can be shown
that the Second Anniversary, despite some flaws, is as a whole one of the
great religious poems of the seventeenth century.

Let us look at the structure of the First Anniversary: An Anatomie of
the World. Wherein, By occasion of the untimely death of Mistris Eliza-
beth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole World is represented.
The poem is divided into an Introduction, a Conclusion, and five distinct
sections which form the body of the work. Each of these five sections is
subdivided into three sections: first, a meditation on some aspect of "the
frailty and the decay of this whole world"; second, a eulogy of Elizabeth

____________________
" John Donne in Meditation." Part of chapter 6 of The Poetry of Meditation, by
Louis L. Martz ( New Haven, 1954), pp. 220-3, 228-48. Copyright 1954 by the Yale
University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Yale University Press.
[In order to allow this section of Professor Martz's study to stand alone, I have made
some slight alterations in the text and expanded some references. Ed.]
1 Donne, Letters ( 1651), p. 219.
-152-

[Big brotheR]

New Bearings in Donne:
"Air and Angels"
by A. J. Smith

Genius carries its perils, and the genius of Samuel Johnson has proved
all but fatal to the true understanding of the poets he called metaphysical.
Nothing could be more brilliant, in the circumstances, than that illustrious
description of the yoking of heterogeneous things by violence together.
Nothing, doubtless by reason of that very brilliance, has set more honest
critics in the mire. For the truth is that the circumstances in which
Johnson made his judgment were totally unpropitious. He was handling
the intimate product of a tradition--almost of a culture--long dispensed
with and more than a century out of mind, of preconceptions as different
from his own as the qualitative Aristotelian physics differed from the
quantitative Newtonian physics which ousted it. And he was unaware that
anything had changed but a fashion of writing. He could not avoid the
prime critical error of treating the offspring of an alien climate as though
it were native to his own soil.

The idea of metaphysical poetry thus begotten had been fertile, as we
all know--to our cost, dare one say? In Johnson's analysis lies more than
the germ of the Donne-cabbalism of our time, not least that large part of
it which derives from Mr. Eliot. Here take their root our familiar notions
of radical imagery, baroque tension and doubt, unified sensibility, emo-
tional apprehension of thought, and the like, their lineage apparent in
their repetition of the Johnsonian error of violent confusion of periods.
We hear of the identity of

the essential metaphysical process of imagery, and of the process of modern
imagery--the secret and invisible welding of the most contradictory elements,
combined with the confusion of the senses, or rather fusion of the senses,
which is the hallmark of modern suggestive writing. 1

____________________
"New Bearings in Donne: 'Air and Angels.'" Contributed by A. J. Smith to English,
vol. xiii ( 1960), published for the English Association by The Oxford University Press.
Copyright © 1960 by the author. Reprinted by permission of the author.
1 J. Isaacs, Poetry ( London, 1951), p. 26.
-171-

[Big brotheR]

Chronology of Important Dates
1572.............................. Born in London
1576 .............................. John Donne (father) died
1584, ..............................23 October Matriculated Hart Hall, Oxford
1587-1591 .............................. At Cambridge (?) or abroad (?)
1591, by May .............................. Law Student at Thavies' Inn
1592, 6 May .............................. Admitted to Lincoln's Inn
1593 ..............................Henry Donne (only brother) died in prison, having been
committed for sheltering a priest
1596, June ..............................Sailed with Essex on the Cadiz Expedition
1597, August .............................. Sailed on Azores Expedition (The Islands' Voyage)
1598 ..............................Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper
1601, December ..............................Secretly married Anne More, niece of Egerton's wife
1602, February .............................. Imprisoned, and dismissed from Egerton's service
1602, April .............................. Released and marriage ratified
1602-06 Lived with Sir Francis Wooley, his wife's cousin, at
Pyrford, Surrey
1606-11 .............................. Lived at Mitcham, with (later) a room in the Strand
1605-07 .............................. Assisted Thomas Morton in controversy with Catholics
1610 ..............................Pseudo-Martyr
1610, 17 April .............................. Hon. M. A., Oxford
1611 ..............................Conclave Ignati and Ignatius His Conclave
1611 ..............................An Anatomy of the World (The First Anniversary)
1611, ..............................November-December
1612 ..............................Abroad with Sir Robert and Lady Drury
1612 ..............................The Second Anniversary, with reprint of The First . . .
1612-1621 .............................. Lived in house in Drury Lane
1615, 23 January .............................. Ordained priest
1615, April ..............................Doctor of Divinity, Cambridge
1616, ..............................October-February
1622.............................. Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn
1617, 15 August .............................. Anne Donne (wife) died
1619, May-December 1620 ..............................Abroad with Doncaster on Embassy to Germany
1621, 19 November.............................. Dean of St. Paul's: moved to Deanery
1623, Winter .............................. Seriously ill: composed Devotions (published 1624)
1624, March .............................. Appointed Vicar of St. Dunstan's in the West
1631, 31 March.............................. Died at Deanery
1633 ..............................Poems
1640 ..............................LXXX Sermons, with first version of Walton Life of
Donne prefixed
[ 1646].............................. Biathanatos
1649 ..............................Fifty Sermons
-180-

[Sameeha]

Terrific

But how can I find the rest of the 3 lines in here.

I'll try to search it

Thanks, sir.

[Big brotheR]

i guess i have just found the whole book

will be updating posts later

[alla*]

lucky u sam :)