Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Judith Scherer Herz

The connection that Crane felt between himself and Donne has more to do with deep structure than surface detail. That was certainly the way the poet and critic-teacher, Josephine Miles, approached the issue of the Donne legacy in her 19 71 essay "Twentieth Century Donne": "What 17th century metaphysical, what Donnian traits could be useful to the present?"(29) What she found was a tradition she called "the poetry of concept countered by concept" (210) within a structure that is both "exceptive and limiting ... not merely and but but and yet, with implicative ifs and concessive thoughs" (218). Her terms are different from Crane's (he figures only briefly in her examples, for his handling of time) but, like him, she locates her investigation within the articulation of the poem's elements, its language and thought (Yeats thus becomes the truest heir with other examples drawn from Auden, Eliot, Cummings, Stevens, Warren, but not from too many at the time of her writing). What she was looking for was less what a twentieth-century poet might want to take from Donne, or how such a poet might read, respond, or echo him, than what Donne and his contemporaries had "deposited" in the language that had survival power (language here conceived almost as a geological stratum--a Burgess shale of teeming syntactic forms), so that coming across W. S. Merwin's "Fear," for example, she sees "the survival [there] of the skeleton of exceptive and adversative concept ... as a wonder worth remark, a suggestion of the surviving power of Donne's thought in the 20th Century" (224).

Thus, despite the interest shown in Donne by Brooke, de la Mare, Elinor Wylie, Dylan Thomas, the Fugitives, among others (connections that George Williamson had identified in his 1931 essay "Donne and Today," where his argument had chiefly centered on the Donne/Eliot link(30)), Miles concludes that "few ... have tried for or achieved that combination of values which makes for a whole likeness rather than a scattering of likenesses." Both Miles and more recently Arthur Clements in his Poetry of Contemplation construct a Donne (for one he's a conceptual, for the other a contemplative poet) then look for modern likenesses.(31) I am more interested in the encounter of poet to poet and in the turns of the ensuing dialogue. However, at the same time, I want to identify the multiple uses to which he has been put, the way he turns up as name, allusion, cultural reference, or simply turn of simile, in undertakings that may or may not resemble his. Or even in the way a Donne figure is suddenly reborn whole in "Natural History," a poem E. B. White sent to his wife, Katherine Angell, in 1929: "Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, / In spider's web a truth discerning, / Attach one silken strand to you / For my returning."(32) Donne as source for Charlotte's Web?

The Donne with whom Miles opened her essay was the Eliotic Donne, the Donne she had grown up with, "direct sensuous apprehension of thought," the immediacy of the odor of the rose, terms that she realized were inadequate as she reread and rethought the poems. It has become a familiar refrain, that mischievous paragraph in the 1921 "Essay on Metaphysical Poetery" (one paragraph and all that fuss!).(33) And the few echoes in the poetry are also familar (they are not so much allusions as nods in the direction of; Eliot talked about Donne far more than he used him). The canonization narrative and the counter narratives, how Eliot needed his version of Donne for his version of Eliot, are familiar, too. But one of the real silences of that narrative is the absent book on Donne. There were the 1926 Clark Lectures, "On the Metaphysical Poetry of the 17th Century," and the 1931 "Donne in Our Time" essay, which offered, it should be emphasized, a considerably nuanced version of the 1921 argument.(34) Thought and sensibility are still fissured but the emphasis now is on language; there is less about the mind of England and more about the natural, conversational style that made it possible for subsequent poets to think in lyric verse. There was, as well, an abbreviated version of the Clark in the 1933 Johns Hopkins Turnbull lectures. There were plans to publish these as The School off Donne but that never happened. Visions and revisions notwithstanding (and there were several), and Eliot's insistence that the lectures not be quoted without permission, there was no book (the lectures were only published a few years ago).(35) Eliot finally gave the rights to the title to A. Alvarez, whose book The School of Donne appeared in 1961.