IGNOU MEG02 BLOCK-2 Unit-13 John Donne: Portrait of the Man, His Thematic and Technical Innovations and textual study of four Love Poems

JOHN DONNE: THE MAN AND THE POET

John Donne (1572-1631) was the son of a prosperous London ironmonger and his mother was the daughter of John Heywood, the epigrammatist. His parents were Catholics. When he was only three or four years old, his father died.

He goes upto Oxford. He matriculated from Hart Hall in October, 1584. His biographer, Izaak Walton says that at the age of fourteen, he moves from Oxford to Cambridge and that he remains there until his seventeenth year. 1591 becomes a law student and travels in Europe. He witnesses the tragic death of his brother.

In 1597 he became Secretary to Thomas Egerton. These achievements give him a sense of fulfilment and, in a mood of elation. Because of his clandestine marriage with Anne More in 1601, he lost his title in 1602. However, his love for his wife remains constant. Probably it provides him with an escape from worldly tension.

1614 became a member of the Parliament but it was soon dissolved. He then is caged in himself, an actor without a part. He talks about the imprisonment of the soul in the body.

Works: A Valediction : forbidding mourning, Monarch of wit, The extasie, The second anniversary, "The Flea" and "Go and Catch the Falling Star"

Died - 1631.

He is a man who vacillates between two masters within him. The one pulls him to the life of sensual pleasures and the other leads him to disenchantment and detachment. His sufferings and religious training make him brood over the idea of the relative importance of body and soul, leading to their interminable dialogue in his major poems. 3 categories:

Satires,
Elegies and Verse letters,
Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems.

John Donne was against Spenser’s Lady love song poems//Impossible she, transforming her into deities. The distinctive flavour of Donnes' poetry lies in his reaction against lavishing praise on the object of love indiscriminately, and with cool objectivity, subjects even personal experiences to vigorous scrutiny, and thus John Donne breaks new grounds in poetry by launching a persistent and unflinching-attack on the ascendancy of poets just alluded to and find of idealizing things. In Divine poems the mood of questioning 1s I there, but there is no attempt to deny the authority of God. The poet is seeking grace and redemption.

John Donne knows that reality is 'diverse, and unless there is an attempt at comprehending the varied facets of reality, the poetry will lack fidelity to thought and experience. A refusal to grapple with the complex living of man results in a poem that presents only a partial perception of the truth of life. In order to overcome this failing, John Donne wants his poetry to go the whole hog in recapturing the variety that composes the intricate pattern of life.

In John Donne's poetics, the poet has to be gifted with two attributes : one is sensibility and the other is judgement. Donne's poetry is endowed with certain elements that are typical not only of his poetry, but all good or great poetry is supposed to have those attributes.

John Donne admits of no distinction between the poetical and the unpoetical. The concept or the image that illustrates his emotion comes into poetry.

Works: the Preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, "Valediction : forbidding mourning", "A Valediction : of weeping" and "The Flea ", "The Good Morrow" , "The Sunne Rising"

Criticism: " Samual Johnson said “the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables '' Donne's verses appear alien to the conventional mode and cause annoyance to the protagonists of the songsters' F. R. Leavis rightly remarks that Donne writes in complete dissociation from music of the time and writes in a stanza form that 'proclaims a union of poetry and music'

Conceit: a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more immediately striking. [2 legs of compass to lovers or tears to globe] the elements of conceit are incongruity, concentration, tight logic and argumentative and dialectical tenor. It is an instrument designed for defining the meaning of the poem or used for persuading the reader to come round to the point of view developed in the poem.

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