Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Donne’s life: a sketch
- 2 The text of Donne’s writings
- 3 The social context and nature of Donne’s writing: occasional verse and letters
- 4 Literary contexts: predecessors and contemporaries
- 5 Donne’s religious world
- 6 Donne’s political world
- 7 Reading and rereading Donne’s poetry
- 8 Satirical writing: Donne in shadows
- 9 Erotic poetry
- 10 Devotional writing
- 11 Donne as preacher
- 12 Donne’s language: the conditions of communication
- 13 Gender matters: the women in Donne’s poems
- 14 Facing death
- 15 Donne’s afterlife
- 16 Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
7 - Reading and rereading Donne’s poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Donne’s life: a sketch
- 2 The text of Donne’s writings
- 3 The social context and nature of Donne’s writing: occasional verse and letters
- 4 Literary contexts: predecessors and contemporaries
- 5 Donne’s religious world
- 6 Donne’s political world
- 7 Reading and rereading Donne’s poetry
- 8 Satirical writing: Donne in shadows
- 9 Erotic poetry
- 10 Devotional writing
- 11 Donne as preacher
- 12 Donne’s language: the conditions of communication
- 13 Gender matters: the women in Donne’s poems
- 14 Facing death
- 15 Donne’s afterlife
- 16 Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Reporter to Bob Dylan: ''What are your songs about?'' Dylan: ''Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.'' ''Pedantique wretch,'' he might have called the reporter had he been channeling Donne, ''for Godsake hold your tongue.'' For there is a similar defiance, a snarkiness, a catch-me-if-you-can in many Donne utterances, both in those that come down on the side of love, of desire made holy, of making the lovers' ''little roome, an every where,'' and in those that flippantly dismiss such possibilities. He may feel himself ''two fooles . . . / For loving, and for saying so / In whining poetry,'' but he persists and dares the reader to determine just what ''draw[ing his] paines / through Rimes vexation'' is all ''about.'' (''Vexation'' is an interesting word for both writer and reader). ''The triple Foole'' from which these lines come is hardly a complex poem, but its playful self-consciousness strikes a note that one will hear in a number of Donne poems, both the serious and the silly. Can grief be real and its expression truthful if ''he tames it, that fetters it in verse?''
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to John Donne , pp. 101 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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