Name : Mary Grace D.

Giangan
Subject: British and American Literature

The Renaissance Period was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th
to the 17th century. This period encompassed a rebellion of classical-based learning, the
development of linear perspective in painting, and gradual but widespread educational
reform. Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and
political disturbance, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments.
One of the authors in this period is John Donne or also known as the Father of
Metaphysical poetry. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include
sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs,
satires and sermons. In his poem entitled, “ The Flea”, Donne demonstrates his ability to
take a controlling metaphor and adapt it to unusual circumstances. “The Flea” is made up
of three nine-line stanzas following an aabbccddd rhyme scheme. This funny little poem
again exhibits Donne’s metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude for turning even the
least likely images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem uses the
image of a flea that has just bitten the speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing
conflict over whether the two will engage in premarital sex. The speaker wants to, the
beloved does not, and so the speaker, highly clever but grasping at straws, uses the flea,
in whose body his blood mingles with his beloved’s, to show how safe such mingling can
be—he reasons that if mingling in the flea is so harmless, sexual mingling would be
equally safe, for they are really the same thing.
The main views of the New Criticism can be applied to novels, poetry, and essays.
John Donne’s “The Flea” is a poem that compares the idea of a flea sucking the blood of
two people to the sexual union of the two individuals. The speaker creates the sense of
similarity between a flea sucking the blood of two people to those two people having
intercourse in a clever and ironic way. “It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, / and in
this flea our two bloods mingled be,” The readers understanding that a flea biting two
people is being compared to intercourse creates a sense of irony in the poem. This irony
is an example of form following content which is valued in New Criticism.
Individuality is highly valued in New Criticism. New Criticism tend to look at
individuality as an aspect of the human condition that overrides environmental factors.
Literary works where characters make a complete turnaround from the cheating, lying,
and being an overall indecent human being to becoming a moral upstanding person
because they found Jesus are troublesome for the New Criticism. This type of character
is troublesome because New Criticism hold the idea that the individual can transcend
their own circumstances and experiences.