(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.
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.

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.

John Donne
 poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious subjects
 wrote cynical verse about inconstancy, 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

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



 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



 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"







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 giveand-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.

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.

 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 You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, oe'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.




Considered the finest of the religious metaphysicals, was an Anglican poet who struggled for years between choosing a religious life or one that was both academic and public.
His collection of religious poems, The Temple: Sacred
Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633), shows him both


Expressing his own sense of the conflict between the claims established on man by worldly wit and sophistication and those of true Christian devotion and
Exploring the significance of the main symbols and beliefs of Protestant Christianity

 Like Donne, Herbert writes poetry which grabs the reader's attention by its opening statement of theme, but unlike Donne, he maintains interest and excitement by the unexpected ways he transforms traditional
Christian material.

 Herbert's poetry is marked by alternating modes of shock and repose : conflict is balanced by calm trust, disturbed speculation by simple faith, ingenious language by simplicity of statement.
 The ultimate struggle or conflict in
Herbert's poetry is between the world and complete surrender to God.

 Herbert's poetry differs from Donne's in four essential ways:
 his work combines religious autobiography with presentation of great Christian themes,
 he uses musical devices and analogies to a greater extent than any other metaphysical poet,
 he does not focus on the struggle for a
"right" faith or a true religion, because he professes to have found it; and
 he produced shaped or pattern poetry.

 perhaps best known for his technique of exploring analogies between emblematic objects--such as the human body or parts of the church building and its furniture--and religious truths.
 He does so primarily through the use of shaped verse .

 Shaped verse is a poem so constructed that its printed form suggests its subject matter or its theme.

(1612/13-1649)



A Catholic convert, Crashaw very nearly lived the last part of his life exiled among the religious metaphysicals.
Although like Herbert he is considered a religious metaphysical, Crashaw's poetry reveals a sensibility and a technique markedly different from that of either
Herbert or Donne.
His collection of poetry entitled Steps to the Temple
(1646) clearly refers to Herbert's earlier work, which he is said to have admired. Crashaw's poetry, however, is far removed stylistically from Herbert's.

 poetry is characterized by a deliberate search for startling and paradoxical expression meant specifically to shock and excite the reader. He achieves this goal in three related ways:


 he presses all of the senses into the service of the expression of religious passion, he uses erotic and other images of physical appetite and desire in a paradoxical way, and he utilizes extravagant paradox involving the secular and the divine, tears and ecstasy, the sensuous and the spiritual.

 Carpe diem" means "seize the day"
 This Latin term was coined by the
Roman poet Horace, and in general it refers to all those works in which one is reminded to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.

 In lyric love poetry, the tradition sometimes becomes a bit of a game, as the lover tries to encourage the woman to enjoy love while they are young and beautiful. We will be reading several versions of the carpe diem poem--including Donne's "The Flea" and
"The Ecstasy," as well as Andrew Marvell's marvelous argument, "To His Coy Mistress."