ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
another poem in the company of Virgil, Lucan, and Tasso. 38 That idealizing but
responsive reading has been considerably complicated since then, and recent
critiques of Donne have generally sought, sometimes explicitly, to downplay his
originality from a variety of angles: by attempting to view him within an
emerging tradition of Protestant poetics in which concern with the self is set in
the larger context of methods and practices that govern Reformed habits of
meditation; by interpreting Donne’s language as already contained within a
contemporary politics of absolutist discourse; or by defining the specific
community of poets—the gentlemen amateurs of the earlier seventeenth
century—with whom Donne frequently affiliated, minor versifiers like Everard
Guilpen or Christopher Brooke, or more able but still marginal and self-professed
amateurs like Sir Henry Wotton and Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose
poetry, once gathered, might add a retrospective grace note to a career already
distinguished by other accomplishments. 39 In many respects, these recent
revaluations seem as necessary as they are inevitable in their response to
problems initiated by several generations of critics who either resisted historical
readings or, operating in the afterglow of Eliot, consistently made Donne the
originator of a “school” of poets. Donne was not so original as Eliot wanted him
(what poet could be?), and he certainly did not think of poetry as a kind of
Yeatsian “artifice of eternity” into which the aching soul could be gathered. We
do not know the occasions motivating all his poems, but we do know that
enough were produced in hopes of personal advancement to question a fully
romanticized view of the creating poet serving his muse in solitude.
But, however we contextualize Donne, it must also be said that he sounds
very little like anyone else. A bit like Jonson perhaps in a few of the elegies, but
surely not much like the other coterie poets with whom he associated; and he
certainly does not sound at all like James or even a good meditating Protestant
like Joseph Hall. Though we can credit his full emergence as a poet-priest to the
efforts of friends, publishers, kin, and hagiographers like Walton, we ought to
recognize that to a great degree Walton, for one, was only amplifying what
Donne had already written. The poet who was obsessed with his own signature
on a pane of glass had reason to be. It was original in the way all discourse is
original, not by claiming to be first, but by claiming to be different from what
came before and then demonstrating that difference within the text. If Donne
can weary us, it is only on this score.
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