John Donne (1572-1631)

1. John Donne (1572-1631) the most outstanding of the English Metaphysical Poets and a churchman famous for his spellbinding sermons

2. Donne was born in London to a prominent Roman Catholic family but converted to Anglicanism during the 1590s. • At the age of 11 he entered the University of Oxford, where he studied for three years. According to some accounts, he spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge

3. John Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit = an extended metaphor that combines two vastly unlike ideas into a single idea, often usingimagery.

4. Donne's poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious subjects. He wrote cynical verse about inconstancyin love, poems about true love, Neoplatonic lyrics on the mystical union of lovers' souls and bodies and brilliant satires and hymns depicting his own spiritual struggles.

5. Whatever the subject, Donne's poems reveal the same characteristicsthat typified the work of the metaphysical poets: dazzling wordplay, often explicitly sexual; paradox; subtle argumentation; surprising contrasts; intricate psychological analysis; and striking imagery selected from nontraditional areas such as law, physiology, scholastic philosophy, and mathematics.

6. Prose • Donne's prose, almost equally metaphysical, ranks at least as high as his poetry. • The Sermons, some 160 in all, are especially memorable for their imaginative explications of biblical passages and for their intense explorations of the themes of divine love and of the decay and resurrection of the body.

7. Major Works • Poetry • TheFirstAnniversary: AnAnatomyoftheWorld (1611)TheSecondAnniversary: OfThe Progres ofthe Soule (1611)Satires (1593)Songs and Sonnets (1601)Divine Poems (1607) • Holy Sonnets, (1607-1613)

8. Essays • Five Sermons Upon SpeciallOccasions (1626)LXXX Sermons (1640) • Six Sermons (1634) • Fifty Sermons (1649) • Essays in Divinity (1651) • Devotions upon Emergent Occasions • Neglected for 200 years, Donne was rediscovered by 20th-century critics. His work has had a profound influence on a number of poets Including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden.

9. John Dryden 1631–1700 • English writer and Poet Laureate (after 1668). The outstanding literary figure of the Restoration, he wrote critical essays, poems, such as Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and dramas, including All for Love (1678).

10. He went to London in about 1657 and first came to public notice with his Heroic Stanzas (1659), commemorating the death of Oliver Cromwell. • The following year, however, he celebrated the restoration of Charles II with Astraea Redux

11. He had a long and varied career as a dramatist. His most notable plays include the heroic dramas, • The Conquest of Granada (2 parts, 1670–71) a blank-verse masterpiece, • All for Love (1677), a retelling of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; • and the comedy Marriage à la Mode (1672).

12. Marriage à la Mode • a half comic and half serious play consisting of two couples" Doralice and Rhodophil and Melantha and Palamede, the first couple married, the second about to be married • the plot is complicated by other two lovers Palmyra and Leonidas and their mistaken identitities. • the play presents Dryden's view on public life, public wit, and publicly contrived relationships at the court - in Dryden's view town and court life is cheap and tawdry • the country life posseses grandeur and nobility.

13. His great political satire on Monmouth and Shaftesbury, Absalom and Achitophel, appeared in two parts (1681, 1682). • by MacFlecknoe (1682), an attack on Thomas Shadwell, • and Religio Laici (1682), • Dryden announced his conversion to Roman Catholicism in The Hind and the Panther.

14. he wrote brilliant critical prefaces, prologues, and discourses, dealing with the principles of literary excellence. The best example is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). • The last part of his life was occupied largely with translations from Juvenal, Vergil, and others.