Abraham Cowley (1618—1667) is a transitional figure, a poet who tended to relinquish the emotional values of John Donne and George Herbert and grasp the edges of reason and wit.He was more versatile than the early Metaphysicals: He embraced the… Read More ›
A question that can be asked of any century’s poetry is whether it owes its character to “forces”—nonliterary developments to which the poets respond more or less sensitively—or whether, on the other hand, the practice of innovative and influential poets… Read More ›
Literary critics place the writing of John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning in the year 1611, when he traveled to Europe. He left behind his pregnant wife, and their separation probably inspired his poem. The title term mourning suggests the… Read More ›
By far John Donne’s most erotic poem, To His Mistress Going to Bed (1669) , also known as Elegy 19, is composed of 48 lines of rhyming couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter. Not an elegy at all in… Read More ›
Scholars of the works of John Donne continue the search for various elements in his poetry to aid in the dating of their creation and even in the ways to refer to the poems. As Donne did not title his… Read More ›
The Good Morrow was first published in John Donne’s posthumous collection Songs and Sonnets (1633) and ranks among his best known love poems. Critics have developed various theories regarding the poem’s symbolism, many relating to the Platonic theory of love…. Read More ›
John Donne enforced a tight structure on his song Go and Catch a Falling Star (1630), with three stanzas each containing sestets with a rhyme scheme of ababcc and concluding with a rhyming triplet. That controlled format contrasts with the… Read More ›
Most critics agree that John Donne wrote The Flea during his youth, before becoming an ordained minister. It was first published as part of Songs and Sonnets in a posthumous collection that appeared in 1630, 1635, 1650, and 1669. As… Read More ›
While discussion continues over the order in which John Donne wrote the individual poems that compose his Holy Sonnets, the critic Helen Gardner has argued convincingly that Death Be Not Proud was published in 1633. Structured as a variant of… Read More ›
Critics basically agree to divide John Donne’s writing into two groups related to his life stages, his romantic, or love, poetry in the stage dating prior to 1615, and the spiritual poetry emanating from the time of his ordination in… Read More ›
Critics feel fairly certain that one group of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets was published in 1633, a collection that included “Batter My Heart,” sometimes listed as “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God.” It gained fame as a prime example of… Read More ›
For Donne as for us, gender matters, deeply, passionately, disturbingly. Donne is constantly writing about women and gender roles, both explicitly and indirectly through analogy and metaphor. Yet unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Donne rarely… Read More ›
TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land, which has come to be identified as the representative poem of the Modernist canon, indicates the pervasive sense of disillusionment about the current state of affairs in the modern society, especially post World War Europe,… Read More ›
Empson, a student of IA Richards, in (1930) promulgates a radically new approach to the language of poetry – to the multiple semantic possibilities of individual words, and to the frequent openness of English syntax to more than one construction…. Read More ›
Cleanth Brooks’ Concept of Language of Paradox
Language of Paradox
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