john DonneJohn Donne
(1572-1631)
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Metaphysical and sensual style
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His works include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin
translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires
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He is also known for his sermons
Style
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Abrupt openings and various paradoxes
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Ironies
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Dislocations
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Dramatic everyday speech rhythms
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His tense syntax and tough eloquence were a reaction against
conventional Elizabethan poetry
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“ The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” Samuel
Johnson.
The
the portrayal of Elizabethan society
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His early poems showed a developed knowledge of Elizabethan society
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His satires dealt with
a. Corruption in the legal system
b. Mediocre poets
c. Pompous courtiers
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His Death sermon is his funeral sermon
Metaphysical
poets
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Donne is the most prominent member of metaphysical poets
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The metaphysical poet is a term coined by Samuel Johnson in 1781,
following comment on Donne by Dryden
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Dryden wrote in 1693, “he affects the metaphysics.”
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In “Life of Cowley”(from Johnson’s 1781 work of biography and criticism,
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets)
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Johnson refers at the beginning of the seventeenth century in which
“there appeared a race of writers that may be termed as the metaphysical
poets.”
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The metaphysical poets are known for their ability to startle the reader
and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument inventive
syntax and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor
known as a conceit
Works
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Biathanatos
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Pseudo Martyr
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Ignatius his conclave
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Devotions upon Emergent occasions
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Holy sonnets
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Death, Be not proud
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The Canonization
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A Valediction forbidding mourning
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Batter my heart
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Songs and sonnets
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Paradoxes and problems
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His compelling examination of the mortal paradox influenced English
poets for generations.
Donne’s
work fell out of favor. It was revived by romantic poets like Coleridge and
Browning and twentieth-century poets like W.B.Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and F. R.
Leavis
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