John Donne, whose poetic reputation languished before
he was rediscovered in the early part of the twentieth century,
is remembered today as the leading exponent of a style of verse
known as “metaphysical poetry,” which flourished in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. (Other great metaphysical poets include
Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, and George Herbert.) Metaphysical
poetry typically employs unusual verse forms, complex figures of
speech applied to elaborate and surprising metaphorical conceits, and
learned themes discussed according to eccentric and unexpected chains
of reasoning. Donne’s poetry exhibits each of these characteristics.
His jarring, unusual meters; his proclivity for abstract puns and
double entendres; his often bizarre metaphors (in one poem he compares
love to a carnivorous fish; in another he pleads with God to make
him pure by raping him); and his process of oblique reasoning are
all characteristic traits of the metaphysicals, unified in Donne
as in no other poet.
Donne is valuable not simply as a representative writer
but also as a highly unique one. He was a man of contradictions:
As a minister in the Anglican Church, Donne possessed a deep spirituality
that informed his writing throughout his life; but as a man, Donne
possessed a carnal lust for life, sensation, and experience. He is
both a great religious poet and a great erotic poet, and perhaps
no other writer (with the possible exception of Herbert) strove
as hard to unify and express such incongruous, mutually discordant
passions. In his best poems, Donne mixes the discourses of the physical
and the spiritual; over the course of his career, Donne gave sublime
expression to both realms.
His conflicting proclivities often cause Donne to contradict
himself. (For example, in one poem he writes, “Death be not proud,
though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art
not so.” Yet in another, he writes, “Death I recant, and say, unsaid
by me / Whate’er hath slipped, that might diminish thee.”) However,
his contradictions are representative of the powerful contrary forces
at work in his poetry and in his soul, rather than of sloppy thinking
or inconsistency. Donne, who lived a generation after Shakespeare,
took advantage of his divided nature to become the greatest metaphysical
poet of the seventeenth century; among the poets of inner conflict,
he is one of the greatest of all time.
