In 1614, just prior to his ordination, John Donne renounced the writing of verse. He was well aware of the widespread opinion that rhyming was an inappropriate avocation for a man of the cloth. Yet, on certain occasions, Donne did write poetry again. In this group of five closely related essays, David Novarr takes a new look at Donne's poems—both secular and divine—written before and after his ordination. He reassesses the validity and utility of widely accepted critical contexts which define our understanding of particular poems, and proposes fresh approaches and interpretations. Novarr's knowledge of Donne's life, his critical insight, and his attention to the details of Donne's texts—all join to make The Disinterred Muse a major contribution to our understanding of Donne and his art.

This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus on the Songs and Sonets to the exclusion of his other works, and the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin explores works throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of St. Paul's in London.

Arthur F. Marotti has produced the first systematic study of John Donne's poetry as coterie literature, offering fresh interpretations of the poems in their biographical and sociohistorical contexts. It will be of interest and value to students and scholars of English Renaissance literature, to critics interested in the application of revisionist history to literary study, and to those concerned with the processes by which literature became institutionalized in the early modern period. Donne treated poetry as an avocation, restricting his verse to carefully chosed readers: friends, acquaintances, patrons, and the woman he later married. This study employs socio-historical and psychoanalytic methods to examine this poetry as work designed for readers to respond in knowledgeable ways to a complex interplay of literary text and social context. Marotti argues that it is necessary to relate literary language to the languages of social, economic, and political transactions and to define the social and ideological affiliations of literary genres and modes. After setting Donne's practice in the framework of the sixteenth-century systems of manuscript literary transmission, Marotti treats the verse chronologically and according to audience, paying particular attention to the rhetorical enactment of the author's relationships to peers and superiors through the conflicting styles of egalitarian assertion, social iconoclasm, and deferential politeness. Marotti relates the poetry to Donne's contemporary prose, discussing the author's choice of various literary forms in the context of his sociopolitical life as well in terms of the shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean rule, the latter change resulting in a realignment of genres within the culture's literary system. He reads Donne's formal satires, humanist verse letters, erotic elegies, and commentary epistles aware of the social coordinates of those particular genres, and defines the markedly different circumstances to which Donne's libertine, courtly, satiric, sentimental, complimentary, and religious lyrics individually belonged. Marotti deals also with Donne's inventive mixing of genres in both shorter and longer poems. Marotti's groundbreaking work offers new models of historical interpretation of Donne's poetry, complementing previous formalist, intellectual-historical, and literary-historical readings. It particularly highlights the importance of attending to the socioliterary conditions of literature designed for manuscript transmission rather than for publication, work that includes, for example, much of the lyric poetry of Renaissance England.

John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion explores the life of one of the most significant figures of the English Renaissance. The book not only provides an overview of Donne’s life and work, but connects his writing and thinking to the ideas, institutions, and networks that influenced him. The book shows how Donne’s faith underpinned his career, from aspirational courtier to phenomenally successful clergyman and preacher, when he became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Donne emerges as a figure obsessed with himself, tormented by the fear that his transgressions may have condemned him to eternal damnation. This fine new account uses Donne’s correspondence, writing, and poetry to give a rounded portrait of a bold, experimental thinker, who was never afraid of taking risks that few others would have countenanced.

The preoccupation of the English Church with the word of scripture during Elizabethan and Jacobian times had both powerful and subtle effects of the literature produced during and immediately after that period, say scholars of English from North America and the Antipodes. They examines works from the 1590s--the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, to 1652--just after the death of Charles I--by both well known and little known authors. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into the discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology.

When poetry was printed, poets and their publishers could no longer take for granted that readers would have the necessary knowledge and skill to read it well. By making poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, print publication radically expanded the early modern reading public. These new readers, publishers feared, might not buy or like the books. Worse, their misreadings could put the authors, the publishers, or the readers themselves at risk. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers' efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers' strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers' interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.