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John Donne

John Donne. (1572-1631). John Donne. was the most outstanding of the English Metaphysical Poets and a churchman famous for his spellbinding sermons. born in London to a prominent Roman Catholic family but converted to Anglicanism during the 1590s.

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John Donne

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  1. John Donne (1572-1631)

  2. John Donne • was the most outstanding of the English Metaphysical Poets and a churchman famous for his spellbinding sermons. • 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 but took no degree at either university. • He began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1592, and he seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. • Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, in 1598. • His secret marriage in 1601 to Egerton's niece, Anne More, resulted in his dismissal from this position and in a brief imprisonment. During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer.

  3. John Donne • principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems (1607) and the prose work Biathanatos (c. 1608, posthumously published 1644), in which he argued that suicide is not intrinsically sinful. • became a priest of the Anglican Church in 1615 and was appointed royal chaplain later that year. • In 1621was named dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. • attained eminence as a preacher, delivering sermons that are regarded as the most brilliant and eloquent of his time.

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

  5. Conceit • a figure of speech which makes an unusual and sometimes elaborately sustained comparison between two dissimilar things.

  6. Petrarchan Conceit • imitate the metaphors used by the Italian poet Petrarch. • used in love poetry, exploits a particular set of images for comparisons with the despairing lover and his unpitying but idolized mistress. • the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and his mistress "a cloud of dark disdain“ • the lady is a sun whose beauty and virtue shine on her lover from a distance. • The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using oxymoron • uniting peace and war • burning and freezing

  7. Metaphysical Conceit • characteristic of seventeenth-century writers influenced by John Donne • noteworthy specifically for their lack of conventionality. In general, the metaphysical conceit will use some sort of shocking or unusual comparison as the basis for the metaphor.  When it works, a metaphysical conceit has a startling appropriateness that makes us look at something in an entirely new way. • draws upon a wide range of knowledge, mainly using highly intellectual analogies; its comparisons are elaborately rationalized. • "The Flea" compares a flea bite to the act of love • In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" separated lovers are likened to the legs of a compass, the leg drawing the circle eventually returning home to "the fixed foot"

  8. Characteristic of Donne's Poetry • It is sharply opposed to the rich melodies with smooth rhythm and flow and the idealized view of sexual love which constituted the central tradition of Elizabethan poetry, especially in writers like the Petrarchan sonneteers and Spenser. • It adopts a diction and meter modeled on the rough give-and-take of actual speech. • It is usually organized in the dramatic or rhetorical form of an urgent or heated argument (first drawing in the reader and then launching the argument). • It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous logic. • It is marked by realism, irony and often a cynicism in its treatment of the complexity of human motives. • It reveals a persistent wittiness, making use of paradox, puns, and startling parallels.

  9. John Donne • Donne's poetry marks sharp stylistic and thematic breaks from the sort of verse written by his predecessors and indeed most of his contemporaries.

  10. Donne's Holy Sonnet 14 • The sonnet is a highly conventional art form, and one would expect a smooth iambic pentameter line.  But notice all the stressed syllables in the first lines of this poem, and how hard it is to read them in the conventional iambic pentameter pattern: • Batter my heart, three-personed God, for YouAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise,  and stand, oe'erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

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