DONNE, THE METAPHYSICALS, AND HIS LEGACY

John Donne is the most famous “Metaphysical Poet” of the 17th century.  The term “metaphysical” to refer to his poetry was first used by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. It was popularized in the 20th century by T. S. Eliot, who lamented what he called a “dissociation of sensibility” that set in during the 17th century, whereas (Eliot said) “a thought to Donne was an experience,” as if mind was not simply a separate thing from embodied experience. Donne’s poetry has long been admired, indeed loved, embraced by later readers, writers, and artists—not just in England and America but in different parts of the world. He has left a rich legacy, and what Judith Scherer Herz calls his “voiceprint” on diverse later writers. In my experience, students always want to spend more time on Donne. In this course, we will do that, reading his poetry with attention but also his prose Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written in 1623 during the plague when he came close to dying. The Devotions found a new life during the AIDs crisis, and then again during our Covid pandemic. The line from the Devotions that begins “No man is an island” has been part of our culture for a century, though many have no idea where it comes from. In this course, we will engage in “attentive,” patient reading of his texts, entering in them, trying to figuring them out, much as Donne sought to figure out lived experience in richly metaphorical writing.

Though Donne is at the center of the course, we will also read a selection of poems by other 17th-century Metaphysical poets—George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell—and Sir Thomas Browne’s prose Hydriotaphia: Or Urn Burial, occasioned by the excavation of ancient burial urns discovered in Norwich. Browne tries to figure out the identity of these urns, then moves to a fascinating survey of the burial practices of different cultures over a long period of time, and then concludes with a profound meditation on memory, legacy, and our desire for immortality, perpetuating our earthly connections. Donne left an impression on so many writers such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney; Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; Djuna Barnes (her novel Nightwood, a lesbian classic), Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht, the Bengali Rabinadrath Tagore; Joseph Brodsky, Yehudah Amichai and Leonard Cohen; Linda