ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
Donne’s imagination, it was the “figures” that seemed to spring from the mind
in an act of poetic self-ravishment that identified this other, apparently alien,
mode of writing and, for North, challenged the domain of the traditionally
poetic. 7 Samuel Johnson would make a similar point in a famous essay written
in the next century. Speaking of a “race of writers” appearing at the beginning
of the seventeenth century, he remarked with no small displeasure that “their
wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before.” 8
Johnson crowned this group with the problematic title of the “metaphysical
poets” when his initial notion of a “race of writers” better conveyed a sense of
their otherness, their strangeness, especially to the mind deeply anchored in
literary decorum; for it was precisely the undecorous—the shocking—that
Donne cultivated and that so struck his contemporaries. “The flame/Of thy
brave soul,” wrote the Caroline court poet, Thomas Carew, “Committed holy
Rapes upon our Will,” a point which he then elaborated upon in an act of
purposefully strenuous imitation, transparent only in celebrating what today
would be called, with no less obliquity, Donne’s phallocentric “hardness”:
thy imperious wit
Our stubborne language bends, made only fit
With her tough-thick-rib’d hoopes to gird about
Thy Giant phansie, which had prov’d too stout
For their soft melting Phrases. 9
Carew made these observations about Donne’s “Giant phansie” in his elegy on
the author written in the early 1630s, probably soon after Donne’s death in
1631, when the late Dean of St. Paul’s was at the height of his popularity. But
they also describe a language, voice, and attitude—especially an attitude—whose
principal effects were forged nearly forty years earlier and did not undergo
significant change in either idiom or utterance. Even if we resist agreeing
completely with Ben Jonson’s view that Donne wrote all his best poetry before
he was twenty-five, there is almost every reason to believe that he wrote much
of the poetry that survives by that age, which means by the late 1590s. At this
point, Donne was in his early to mid-twenties. He had been born in 1572, the
child of a well-to-do citizen ironmonger of the same name and Elizabeth
Heywood, the youngest daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist, writer of
interludes, musician, and Catholic recusant descended from Sir Thomas More.
He had already seen something of the world: Oxford, from 1583–7(?), perhaps
Cambridge for another two years, and the Inns of Court in London, probably
from 1591–4, where he studied law. As the Marshall engraving of Donne in 1591
reveals, he also had military aspirations that were realized in 1596–7, if not
earlier, when he joined the Earl of Essex in the campaign against the Spanish
and sailed to the Azores. 10
In many regards, Donne’s was a typical career of a late Elizabethan courtier.
A great frequenter of the theater and the ladies, he was educated in the arts and
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