Since 1921, the year of T.S. Eliot’s review of Grierson’sMetaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, John Donne’s poetry has been of central interest for a large ‘Communitie’ of critics. That Donne’s writing is ‘good’ and should thus be loved, has rarely been disputed – when it was, as by Fish, others have been eager to counter charges of Donne’s egocentricity by exposing the critic’s own self-centredness instead (Fish, 1999; Brett, 1999; Strier, 1995). The majority of the critical ‘Communitie’ would however agree that not everything Donne wrote is deserving of the critic’s ‘love’. The poem under consideration, a...

This short verse epitomises the major purpose of Donne’s sermons. Humankind’s reconciliation with God is their central concern. There were two major channels through which such a conversion might be achieved: the sermon and the Eucharist. Despite their interrelatedness, homiletic and ritual elements of the early modern English service did not readily coexist – which is why an analysis of how Donne’s sermons combine homiletics with ritual starts off my discussion of his pulpit performances.

Moreover, the above quotation places Christ in a humble position, picturing him, together with the speaker of this verse, in the act of praying. Donne’s sermon...

Despite almost two hundred years of critical neglect, Donne is nowadays thoroughly ‘Canoniz’d’. His popularity results from his erotic and devotional poetry, but it is the interrelationship between the two genres that makes for Donne’s idiosyncrasy. Hence ‘hymnes’ are to bring about ‘The Canonization’ of two not merely spiritual lovers, who ‘dye and rise the same’ (l. 26). While this may be read as a reference to Christ’s death and resurrection, its orgasmic and phallic allusions would have been lost neither on early modern audiences (Carey, 1990: 29) nor on modern-day readers. Donne’s provocative ambiguity remains one of the most...

Whereas Donne’s erotic poems are much indebted to religious metaphor, his nineteen ‘Holy Sonnets’ strongly rely on erotic imagery. After an analysis of Donne’s religiously erotic poems, these are now to be compared to his erotically religious poetry. As it engages in a histrionics of love making, Donne’s erotic poetry conceives of love as a matter of (artful) performance, hence subscribing to a concept of love as passion as defined by Niklas Luhmann (Halpern, 1999), but also Roland Barthes. Passion does not denote a state of fulfilment here, but rather desire, the absence of sexual gratification (Stanwood et al., 1993:...

Donne’s letters have aroused the interest of literary critics in so far as they may shed some biographical light on their author. Much as one may be wary of identifying the speaker of a literary text with its author, this is commonly done in the case of letters. The idea of the letter as a mirror of its writer’s soul had great currency during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England (Müller, 1980; Jagodzinski, 1999: 76). Influenced by Antiquity, much of early modern epistolary writing adopted Demetrius’s theory of the letter and its style as emblematic of its author, and...

This chapter centres onDevotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a work originating from an illness during which Donne considered himself on the verge of death, and one of the few writings he published. There are important points of contact between epistolary and devotional modes: as the post-Reformation period witnessed shifts in devotional practices and a new interest in the self, these changes had consequences for early modern epistolary styles (Henderson, 2002: 27, 35; cf. Schneider, 2005: 37; How, 2003: 200). Moreover, just as most letter writers would have observed epistolary conventions at the same time as they adapted them for their...

In the field of Donne studies, there is much to learn not only about this writer’s amorous and religious desires but also about the desires latent in literary criticism. Many Donne scholars both want to be Donne and to be done (Saunders, 2006: 3–4). By approaching his writings as denominationally more or less neutral performances, I have refrained from assigning Donne to any particular religious confession. I have taken care to avoid projecting on to him any of my own convictions, and creating a Donne in the image of my own religious desires. Such evasion is, of course, not...