John Donne: A05 Critics Flashcards
Collin Burrow - Poets are metaphysical in the sense that they combine …
‘These poets are metaphysical in the sense that they combine thought (or metaphysical speculation) with feeling in ways that were distinctive to the seventeenth century’.
Collin Burrow - What are the metaphysical poets united by?
“It is traditionally said that the Metaphysical poets were united by the use of far-fetched comparisons, or ‘conceits’, that drew attention to their own ingenuity’.
Dame Helen Gardener - What is the reader held to in Donne’s poetry?
In Donne’s poetry ‘The reader is held to an idea or line of argument’.
Dame Helen Gardener - What kind of opening is metaphysical poetry famous for?
‘Metaphysical poetry is famous for its abrupt, personal opening in which a man speaks to his mistress, or addresses his God, or sets a scene, or calls us to mark this or that’.
What did Donne himself write?
‘I cannot plead innocency of life, especially of my youth’.
Ilona Bell - Donne reinvigorates poetic language with what?
‘Donne reinvigorates poetic language with “new made idiom” drawn from science and from everyday life: medicine, law, trade, finance, astronomy’.
T. S. Eliot (who championed Donne’s poetry) on Donne’s conceits: ‘A development of rapid association of thought which…’
‘A development of rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader’.
T.S. Eliot on Donne’s poetry as a psychological process: ‘A thought to Donne was an …’
‘A thought to Donne was an EXPERIENCE; it modified his sensibility […] a poet’s mind […] is constantly amalgamating disparate experience’
Dame Helen Gardener: ‘A conceit is a comparison …’
‘A conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness’.
John Stubbs: ‘He became one of the great…’
‘He became one of the great SECULAR and SPIRITUAL writers of the late Renaissance, and of world literature. His poems […] are to be found in the spiky scripts of commonplace books dating from his own lifetime and after his death’
‘As a student, Donne’s laconic, feisty, barbed, demonically clever verse was admired by close coteries of readers, most of them friends or poetically minded young men’.
Samuel Johnson: ‘To show their learning was …’
‘To show their learning was their whole endeavour […] The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’.
Romantic Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
‘Where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so’
–> Fan of the intellectual rigour of Donne’s poetry - an intellectual puzzle that requires thoughts and makes no concessions to the reader.
Henry Hallam’s pejorative comment on Donne’s verse: ‘The conceits have not even the merit of being …’
‘The conceits have not even the merit of being INTELLIGIBLE, and it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages that we should care to read again’.
–> ‘Intelligible’ - remark on how the complexity of Donne’s ideas repelled readers.
