The Writings of John Donne Essays -- Biography Biographies Essays

The 17th century opened with a generation of smashing social change which culminated in the eventual execution of King Charles I in 1649. This created an atmosphere of conflict that permeates much of the literature of the period. The writings of ass Donne are rife with this conflict, reflecting in their content a side of fuck and women radically and cynically altered from that which preceding generations of poets had handed down.   John Donnes view of love deviated greatly from the Medieval philosophy of courtly love, which had been expressed in poetry handed down from the sonnets of such poetic giants as Sidney and Petrarch. The commonplace verse until then had focused greatly on the unrivalled splendor of love in the context of the life of the poet (or his creations voice). Until then, love had consisted mostly of an irresistible impulse with one woman, and an geographic expedition of the feelings and situations that this caused in the narrator.   Donnes reversal o f that introversion came in the conformity of an intellectual exploration of the nature of his relationships themselves. His verses often point out the selfishness congenital to new love, as in The Good-Morrow. In this poem, Donnes focus is on the exploration of the new creative activity, which he then twists around to imply that his entire world is formed between his mistress and himself. Love makes one room an everywhere. (l. 10) His poetic vanity (conception) is an explication of the emotional conceit (vanity) underlying love. A clearer example of the universalization of love is seen in The Sun Rising with the lines She is all states, and all princes I,/Nothing else is. (ll. 21-22) With the equal weightiness of both his mistress and Donnes part, we see a much more balan... ...iewed as equals without the risk of disrupting social norms. Yet he still attempts to naturalize against the jot of this doctrine.   These social norms had been established in poetry for several hundreds of years when Donne began his work breaking them down. Working against such conventions in the perception of love and women, Donne radically altered his poetry to accommodate both a more humane and more equal view of both. In the end, the effect of these changes may nurse been lost for a few centuries, as his poetry was swept past and not embraced until the onset of Modernism, but perhaps, given the underlying misogyny of his poetry, this was for the best. dismissal from the diminutive extreme to the entirely distrusted extreme may have been a more frightening alternative for womens history than the more gradual put on from silence we now conceive of.