Donne Critical Analysis Flashcards
The dissolution between the private and public realms of love
“love itself is political - involves power transactions between men and women” (Guibbory)
Donne’s destruction of the deified woman
“to demolish the idealised image of woman… no longer an object of worship”
“remove woman from the pedestal” (Guibbory)
The feminine is debased to an object of colonisation
“the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and the Soul from the male” (Aristotle)
“he compares women to animals, fields, land, and their bodies are imperfect and open.” (Guibbory)
Aristotelian concept of the patriarch
“the male is separate from the female, since it is something better and more divine”
The carnal act is seen as a battle of dominance
“the lover empowers the mistress and thus ultimately holds the reigns of control” (Guibbory)
Self-fulfilment of love
“to dissolve the boundary between self and other”
“Love is mere appetite” (Guibbory)
Loss of religious idols in the idolisation of the female body
“all-consuming love has left no place for God.” (Guibbory)
The immortal and eternal nature of love, temporal nature of living
“The experience of love - transcendent, durable - contrasts with the mutable public world, dominated by time.” (Guibbory)
Absence and rejection seen in Donne
“a nothingness even more lost and blank than the original nothing that preceded Creation”
“a special kind of nothing” (Carey)
Donne appears as the equivocator of the feminine
“Donne affects the metaphysics and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy” (Dryden)
Disparity in Donne’s writing
“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” (Johnson)
“the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible” (Hallam)
Appearance of apostrophe- the silent muse
“in our mind’s eye glimpse the shadowy ‘she’ or ‘thou’ addressed as a fugitive presence just beyond the margin of the book.” (Davies)
The act of conceit, subjecting himself to the poetry
“a thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility” (TS Eliot)
Deification of the feminine
“Petrarchan poets exalt the beloved as a heavenly, angelic creature… forever adored and forever unattainable” (Bell)
Donne breaks away from literary and societal constraints
“the rules of grammar seem as constraining and irrelevant as the clothing the lovers discard” (Bell)
