Though he had wont to search with glazed eyes, The more perilous the encounters of clandestine lovers, the greater zest they have for their pleasures, whether they seek to outwit the disapproving world, or a jealous husband, or a forbidding and deeply suspicious father, as in Elegy 4, “The Perfume”: The poetry inhabits an exhilaratingly unpredictable world in which wariness and quick wits are at a premium. Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown, Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Two lovers who have turned their backs upon a threatening world in “ The Good Morrow“ celebrate their discovery of a new world in each other: For instance, a lover who is about to board ship for a long voyage turns back to share a last intimacy with his mistress: “Here take my picture” ( Elegy V). His high place in the pantheon of the English poets now seems secure.ĭonne’s love poetry was written nearly 400 years ago yet one reason for its appeal is that it speaks to us as directly and urgently as if we overhear a present confidence. He is not a poet for all tastes and times yet for many readers Donne remains what Ben Jonson judged him: “the first poet in the world in some things.” His poems continue to engage the attention and challenge the experience of readers who come to him afresh. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, among others, discovered in his poetry the peculiar fusion of intellect and passion and the alert contemporariness which they aspired to in their own art. Donne may no longer be the cult figure he became in the 1920s and 1930s, when T.S. Its extraordinary appeal to modern readers throws light on the Modernist movement, as well as on our intuitive response to our own times.
In the first two decades of the 20th century Donne’s poetry was decisively rehabilitated.
His prose remained largely unnoticed until 1919. It was not until the end of the 1800s that Donne’s poetry was eagerly taken up by a growing band of avant-garde readers and writers. Throughout the 18th century, and for much of the 19th century, he was little read and scarcely appreciated. During the Restoration his writing went out of fashion and remained so for several centuries. For some 30 years after his death successive editions of his verse stamped his powerful influence upon English poets. In Donne’s own day his poetry was highly prized among the small circle of his admirers, who read it as it was circulated in manuscript, and in his later years he gained wide fame as a preacher. The history of Donne’s reputation is the most remarkable of any major writer in English no other body of great poetry has fallen so far from favor for so long. After a resurgence in his popularity in the early 20th century, Donne’s standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured. Donne often employs conceits, or extended metaphors, to yoke together “heterogenous ideas,” in the words of Samuel Johnson, thus generating the powerful ambiguity for which his work is famous. His work is distinguished by its emotional and sonic intensity and its capacity to plumb the paradoxes of faith, human and divine love, and the possibility of salvation. He was born in 1572 to Roman Catholic parents, when practicing that religion was illegal in England. The English writer and Anglican cleric John Donne is considered now to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time.
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