Grady H. John Donne and Baroque Allegory The Aesthetics of Fragmentation 2017

JOHN DONNE AND BAROQUE ALLEGORY
John Donne has been one of the most controversial poets in the
history of English literature, his complexity and intellectualism
provoking both praise and censure. In this major reassessment of
Donne’s poetry, Hugh Grady argues that his work can be newly
appreciated in our own era through Walter Benjamin’s theory of
baroque allegory. Providing close readings of The Anniversaries, The
Songs and Sonnets, and selected other lyrics, this study reveals Donne
as being immersed in the aesthetics of fragmentation that defines
both the baroque and the postmodernist aesthetics of today. Synthe-
sizing cultural criticism and formalist analysis, Grady illuminates
Donne afresh as a great poet for our own historical moment.
hugh grady is Professor Emeritus of English at Arcadia University.

His published works include The Modernist Shakespeare (1992),
Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne (2002), and Shakespeare
and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2009). He has also edited four
critical anthologies and published a number of articles, most of which
have investigated ways in which contemporary critical theory can be
applied to works of early modern literature.
JOHN DONNE AND
BAROQUE ALLEGORY
The Aesthetics of Fragmentation
HUGH GRADY
Arcadia University, Pennsylvania
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© Hugh Grady 2017
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names: Grady, Hugh author.
title: John Donne and baroque allegory : the aesthetics of
fragmentation / Hugh Grady, Arcadia University, Pennsylvania.
description: Cambridge ; New York : University Printing House, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2017012428| isbn 9781107195806 (hardback : alk. paper) |
isbn 9781316646946 (pbk. : alk. paper)
subjects: lcsh: Donne, John, 1572-1631–Criticism and interpretation. |
Allegory. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940.
classification: lcc pr2248 .g67 2017 | ddc 821/.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012428
isbn 978-1-107-19580-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
In memory of Terence Hawkes (1932–2013)
Contents
Acknowledgments page viii
1 Walter Benjamin and John Donne: Constellations of

Past and Present 1
2 The Anniversaries as Baroque Allegory: Mourning, Idealization,
and the Resistance to Unity 64
3 Donne’s The Songs and Sonets: Living in a Fragmented World 94
4 Allegorical Objects and Metaphysical Conceits: Thinking about
Donne’s Tropes with Benjamin 137
5 The Metaphysics of Correspondence or a Fragmented World?
Baroque Poetics in the Seventeenth Century 170
Conclusion 207
Bibliography 212
Index 226
vii
Acknowledgments
Conversations with many colleagues were an important part of the gesta-

tion of this work. First and most important in this connection has been
my wife, Sue Wells, who has listened, discussed, proposed ideas, and
supported the project from its beginnings. Indeed, we have shared a
love of Donne’s poetry for the many decades of our relationship. I also
benefited from informal discussions of some of the ideas presented here
with Evelyn Gajowski, David Hawkes, Richard Strier, Arthur Marotti,
Barbara Bono, and Jim Bono.
Parts of an early draft of this manuscript were read and commented on
by Heather Dubrow, who was an important supporter and constructive
critic of this project. I owe a special debt to Theresa DiPasquale, who read
and commented on an early draft of Chapter 1 (and the prospectus as a
whole) and made important suggestions, some of which were incorporated
into the work. Anonymous readers at the journal Modern Philology helped
improve parts of what came to be part of Chapter 3. And two astute
anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press made additional
suggestions that contributed strongly to the final version.
I want to thank Arcadia University librarian Michelle Reale for her
important work in helping to track down appropriate databases, books,
and articles used in this work.
Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 were recontextualized and reframed in an
article in The John Donne Journal 32 (2013): 107–29. Papers drawn from
this project were presented at the 2015 John Donne Society Annual
Meeting at Baton Rouge, LA, February 26–28, 2015, and at the
2017 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Philadelphia,
January 5, 2017.
viii
1
Walter Benjamin and John Donne

Constellations of Past and Present
Benjamin, Donne, and the Era of the Baroque

This book began with an intuition about a certain “fit” between the lyric
poetry of John Donne and the account of baroque aesthetics that Walter
Benjamin gave in both his The Origin of German Tragic Drama and later in
his work on Baudelaire in the Arcades Project. I had been immersed in
Benjamin’s theory of allegory in working on the second part of my 2009
book, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, “The Aesthetics of Death and
Mourning,” and in the course of this work, it began to occur to me that
there was another application of this theory, beyond the dramas that
Benjamin emphasized and on which I concentrated in that study, to the
lyric as well. Benjamin had also seen the opening to lyric poetry, and he
went on to apply aspects of his theory to the Symbolist poetry of Charles
Baudelaire in a different era. What occurred to me was that there was a
similar application of the theory to Donne’s poetry, another product of the
baroque age that Benjamin had explored in The Origin. And I was sur-
prised to discover that no previous critic had ever pursued the connection,
despite a burgeoning literature in recent years on Benjamin’s literary-
critical ideas.
This new interest in Benjamin has in part resulted from the persistence
and labors of Harvard University Press, which has over the last twenty
years brought out English translations of major works from Benjamin’s
entire career, so that it is now possible to gain a much fuller understanding
and appreciation of the extent and range of his critical and philosophical
writings in a tragically short career as a socially critical man of letters.1
Benjamin has been most appreciated for his contributions to under-
standing consumer culture and modernity more generally in a series of
well-known essays – and in greater detail in the notes to his never
completed work on Baudelaire and his nineteenth-century context, post-
humously published as The Arcades Project.2 There has also been sustained
1
2 John Donne and Baroque Allegory
attention for some time to the difficult prose of his 1928 “Trauerspielbuch,”
The Origin of German Tragic Drama,3 with its theory of baroque allegory,
which was a major influence on the early deconstructive criticism of the
Yale School critics and which has subsequently found other applications. It
is a unique work and one that is widely acknowledged to be both a rich
resource for subsequent critical theory and a challenge to read and com-
prehend. Its belated reception has unfolded slowly and unevenly – and
relatively selectively, with the theory of allegory, again usually in relation to
Modernism/Postmodernism, getting the most attention.
This work in particular (and the many other aspects of his larger body of
writings), however, are also highly relevant to early modern literature – and
to the works of John Donne specifically – for two principal reasons. First,
Benjamin developed the theory of allegory precisely for the age of the
German baroque in the early to mid-seventeenth century, and he included
aspects of the plays of the roughly contemporary playwrights Shakespeare
and Calderón as well, so it is specifically crafted for Donne’s era and its
baroque connections. Second, its discussion of a unique idea of the allegory
and its differentiation from the symbol, and its speculation on how the
form arose in English Renaissance plays (as well as in the later seventeenth-
century German baroque drama, which is Benjamin’s main topic), is
particularly germane here.4 In addition, while it is obviously less directly
relevant to seventeenth-century literature than is the work on the Trauer-
spiel, Benjamin’s intensive study of Baudelaire in his work on the Arcades
Project in the 1930s5 is connected to the earlier theory in several ways and
will be brought to bear from time to time in what follows as well. Baude-
laire, I should note, was of course often compared with Donne – even
before Eliot’s theory of the dissociation of sensibility in 1921 (and thereafter
quite frequently). Thus, Benjamin’s interest in and work on Baudelaire is
another reason for seeing him as relevant to a study of Donne. For all these
reasons and others to be developed below, this book argues that Walter
Benjamin’s literary theories can help illuminate the poetry of John Donne
and contribute to developing new directions in Donne studies.
While the many details will be developed below in the individual
chapters, I want to note here the way Benjamin synthesizes avant la lettre
two strains within contemporary early modern studies that have usually
been seen as opposites, even opponents: historical, political, and cultural
criticism, on the one hand, and formalism, on the other.6 Benjamin
affiliated intellectually with Marxism in the late 1920s and throughout
the ’30s, and in tandem with Marxist cultural analysis he was committed to
the idea of situating the artwork in its historical context and striving to
Walter Benjamin and John Donne 3
bring out its political implications, particularly for his present (as I will
discuss shortly). He could easily be credited, in fact, as the inventor of
cultural studies, with his career-long innovations in the study of photog-
raphy (beginning as early as 1926), film, children’s literature and toys, and
radio. His famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” has been among the most influential contributions to
cultural studies (and beyond) ever written.7
But like his friend and sometime critic Theodor Adorno, he held that
the form of the work of art was essential to its existence and must be a
central aspect of the criticism thereof. This is obvious in Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels – known in English under the slightly mistranslated
title The Origin of German Tragic Drama. That work was written before he
had decided to affiliate with Marxism, and it was prepared (in vain, as it
turned out) to fulfill academic requirements, but Benjamin always claimed
it as relevant to his more obviously Marxist writings in later life that clearly
built on it. Its central pursuit is the understanding of how a group of
seventeenth-century German dramas traditionally called Trauerspiele
constituted a new literary form, separate from tragedy proper (hence the
mistranslation in the English title), and profoundly connected to the
history of culture in the baroque era. Central to its argument was a highly
original theory of allegory in a special sense defined by Benjamin in the
course of the study.
I will return to these issues in much greater detail below. My point here
is to underline how much of his argument is formalist in nature. This
interest in formalism did not end with his affiliation with Marxism but
deepened and became explicitly materialist. Benjamin became interested in
developing understandings of how aesthetic forms were related to the rise
of capitalism and the complex interactions of historical-cultural develop-
ment. This interest can be seen in almost all the major works of his later
writings: in his analyses of Proust, Baudelaire, and Brecht and in his
pioneering work in photography and film in particular.
It is because of this combination, I think, that Benjamin (and related
theorists along the same lines such as Theodor Adorno and Fredric
Jameson) can help mediate between competing impulses in contemporary
Donne and early modern studies. I hope to exemplify this impulse in what
follows, as I try to give due attention to important issues of form in Donne
as well as his social and political connections. As we will see, this is an
impulse that others in the field are following up on in different ways as
well, as Heather Dubrow noted in her Presidential Address to the John
Donne Society in 2016, to which I will return briefly below.
This emphasis on form and its connection to its cultural context is a
quality of his work that Benjamin shared with Theodor Adorno. Despite
the many differences that emerged over the course of their years of
intellectual friendship, this fundamental approach to art criticism never
wavered for either. In Benjaminesque baroque allegory, as in Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory, the function of artistic form is “to make historical content
... into a philosophical truth.”8 Benjamin’s work is fundamentally formalist
and historicist9 – and presentist as well, as we will see.
It is to this last, presentist dimension I want to turn now. Benjamin’s
thinking on the relation of past and present in the production of the work
of art, his theory of the “now” (Jetztzeit), in particular, can help clarify
Donne’s reception history. As I have written previously, Benjamin is
(in the terms of today’s critical lexicon) a “presentist,” a critic committed
to the idea that our readings of the past need to acknowledge and affirm
our own situation in the contemporary world.10 This means, among other
things, that our views of the past will change and develop as our own
culture changes – and so of course must our views and interpretations of
the great writers of the past. Necessarily, we need to think about what kind
of Donne the twenty-first century will give us; or perhaps, it is better to
say, what twenty-first century Donne we will ourselves construct.
Walter Benjamin’s Presentism

The recent publication of what is likely to be for the indefinite future the
definitive critical biography of Benjamin makes the task of getting at some
of the subtleties of Benjamin’s theory of the now-time easier than ever
before.11 He meditated on the problems of the relation of past and present
in the work of art (and knowledge in general) from his earliest days as a
philosopher-critic to his very last work, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” and some knowledge of the beginning does indeed help clarify
the enigmatic terms of his last writing on the subject.
In Eiland and Jennings’s account, the theory begins in the young
Benjamin’s reactions in his early university years to a version of
neo-Kantianism that tended to historicize the categories of knowledge
and critiqued the positivistic historicism of Leopold von Ranke, with its
well-known goal of writing history “as it was.”12 Like anyone educated in
the German university system of the day, he was instinctively Hegelian
(since the whole enterprise of cultural history pursued in the German
literature and aesthetics departments of that time was organized according
to Hegelian notions of culture unfolding historically). But of particular
importance was his reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, especially
his Creative Evolution and Matter and Memory.13 It was Bergson’s idea of
lived experience, and of the prolongation of the past in the present, that
helped set off the sparks of Benjamin’s later notion of the importance of
the segmented time in memory and the crucial importance of the present
moment in our experience. 14
The ideas of Nietzsche were also part of the inspiration for Benjamin,
particularly Nietzsche’s criticism of nineteenth-century positivist
approaches to history such as von Ranke’s.15 Eventually in the 1930s, some
ideas of the young Marx (“The world has long dreamed of something of
which it has only to become conscious in order to possess it in actuality”16)
helped fructify Benjamin’s thinking along these lines. Benjamin continued
throughout his career to critique the idea that the past can be reconstituted
objectively and definitively separated from the present in which the
historian lives.
There are obvious lessons to be drawn here that apply to some of today’s
deradicalized historical criticism, including much of the “old” historicism
now making something of a comeback, as well as the “new materialism” of
recent years.17 Attempts within these critical schools to reproduce the past
“just as it was” would amount, in Benjamin’s terms, to an impossible
attempt to restore to the work of art (in this case the work of literature) its
lost aura, its embeddedness in an original ritual-like context that contrib-
uted significantly to the work’s uniqueness, its nonreproducibility. In one
of his most famous essays, Benjamin argues that however valuable the aura
once was, it must give way in our times to the reality of “technological
reproducibility”18 (or “mechanical reproduction” in an older translation).
“Words, too, can have an aura of their own,” Benjamin wrote in a
different essay.19 The aura, strictly speaking, is not the property of the object,
but rather it is a quality of the act of perceiving it – a quality based on
distance, and productive of a sense of uniqueness, of authenticity. Natural
objects also have an aura, Benjamin writes, and we endow them with it. 20
In effect, positivist historical criticism attempts in its readings to repro-
duce the aura of poetry (and other forms of literature), in the process
creating false essences, losing the immediacy of the artwork, that is, its
potential for achieving legibility (to use Benjamin’s term) in our present.
This kind of search for aura, Samuel Weber writes, is one whose goal is to
define for the artwork its “fixed place, that would take its place in and as a
world picture.”21 Instead, I argue, we ought to search for the possibility of
new legibilities, new constellations of meaning created by the aging of the
work and the emergence of the future in our present.22
Benjamin nurtured these and similar ideas in his long work with and
translation of Proust, his writing about Kafka, and his study of Baudelaire.
It is also a central motif in his study of the seventeenth-century German
baroque dramas or Trauerspiele, as we see, for example, in his famous
dictum from that study, “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what
ruins are in the realm of things.”23 Time is sedimented in the baroque plays
in a way analogous to its complex sedimentation in key works of Modern-
ism such as Proust’s In Remembrance of Time Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s
and Pound’s poetry, or Faulkner’s novels.24 Benjamin was in The Origin
explicit about the connection between the seventeenth-century dramas he
was analyzing and the works of contemporary German Expressionism – he
mentions specifically a 1915 adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women by
Franz Werfel, Die Troerinnen.25
But Benjamin went on to contemplate what happens to the work of art
as it enters history, as it ages and is read and reinterpreted from epoch to
epoch. For him, the afterlife of the work of art is crucial to its meaning for
us, as crucial as is its meaning at its point of origin. Indeed, since the latter
is essentially unrecoverable by us (a fortiori in the case of centuries-old
works) because the original social situation and context have vanished, the
afterlife is even more important – though Benjamin also believed (unlike
some contemporary poststructuralists) that something of the original
meaning always survived, and got recontextualized in subsequent ages.
This is one of Benjamin’s most central ideas, and he returns to it in a
variety of formulas over many years. One of its fullest expressions is found
in the collection of notes for the Arcades Project:
What distinguishes images from the “essences” of phenomenology is their
historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomen-
ology abstractly through “historicity”). These images are to be thought of
entirely apart from the categories of the “human sciences”: from so-called
habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index of the images not
only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they
attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to
legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their
interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic
with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognisability. In it, truth is
charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and
nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth
of authentic historical time, the time of truth). It is not that what is past
casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past;
rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with
the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a
standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely
temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not
temporal in nature but figural <bildich> [sic]. Only dialectical images
are genuinely historical – that is, not archaic – images. The image that is
read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognisability – bears to
the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all
reading is founded.26
This quote – and particularly the striking, Donne-like oxymoron “dialect-
ics at a standstill” – has become rightly celebrated,27 and I will return to it
in Chapters 4 and 5. But Benjamin’s preoccupation with the importance of
the “now” in the understanding of art and culture recurs continually in his
writings. In his last work, “On the Concept of History” (1940), he put it
this way:
History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous,
empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robe-
spierre, ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he
blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed
itself as Rome incarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites
a by-gone mode of dress.28
Benjamin is thus particularly a theorist of a presentism interested in
mediating constantly between the past of the work’s construction and
the present of the moment of reading. His idea is both to avoid facile
parallels between past and present and to avoid an attempt to isolate the
past from the present. What he calls for is a kind of creative violence (as the
use of the term “blast” in the above quote indicates), a simultaneous,
interpenetrating moment of perception in which past and present reveal
each other in each other:
The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image
that flashes up at the moment of its recognisability, and is never seen again.
“The truth will not run away from us”: this statement by Gottfried Keller
indicates exactly that point in historicism’s image of history where the
image is pierced by historical materialism. For it is an irretrievable image
of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not
recognize itself as intended in that image.29
To be sure, some caveats and qualifications need to made in our sober
present concerning Benjamin’s ecstatic language in the last quote. First is
his reference to “historical materialism,” a common synonym for Marx-
ism. It is clear to any student of Marxism that this particular version is
one that is unique to Walter Benjamin and has never been universally
embraced by adherents of what has become a hugely variegated, non-
unified set of ideas. As readers of Benjamin, we need to mentally insert a
kind of “translation,” so that “historical materialism” means in Benjamin
something like the “in-process version of Marxist thinking I am construct-
ing.” Second is the issue of the sense in which it can be said that the past
work's meaning for us in a later time is “intended.” I take this formula as
a rule of Benjamin’s hermeneutics of the construction of the “legibility” of
a work in a later epoch: we must take its meaning as intended for us
because only thus can we grasp what it means now in the Jetztzeit as an
inescapable meaning – one inherent in the socio-historical process in
which the work has been reproduced and refunctioned over the ages.
Such meanings are “intended” because they are the inevitable outcomes of
the aging of the artwork.
In what follows, I want particularly to apply these ideas of the unfolding
of the meaning of the artwork in history to the complicated and virtually
unique case of Donne’s extremely varied reception in history – and
particularly to the invention of the “Modernist Donne” of the post–
World War I era30 epitomized by T. S. Eliot’s famous championing of
Donne and “Metaphysical poetry” in his 1921 article “The Metaphysical
Poets.” It will be necessary as well to review the contemporaneous but
quite distinct development of the idea of the baroque over the same years
in order to properly contextualize one of Benjamin’s key terms and to lay
the basis for one of the latest developments in our understanding of Donne
in the present. This leads to the inevitable issue of what has been and what
should be the contours of a still evolving Donne.
Donne’s Afterlife
The bare outlines of the story of Donne’s reception are well known,
although there have been some fairly recent discoveries that have not
circulated widely beyond Donne specialists. In his early writing career,
Donne cultivated a limited, “coterie” audience but found a wider reader-
ship and became known by a segment of the reading public of his day
through copied manuscripts. In the process, as Ernest Sullivan wrote in an
important study of the issue, “Donne lost all control over his manuscript
readers” because of all the unauthorized copying.31 Many of the poems
also found their way into print during his lifetime (and well after) as
Sullivan also discovered in his ground-breaking study of Donne’s “uncol-
lected seventeenth-century printed verse” from 1993.32 As a result Donne
became a popular poet despite his apparent intentions not to be, and he
earned a reputation as the great exemplar of the poetry of wit or mental
acuity during his lifetime and for the rest of the seventeenth century and
beyond.
In addition, Donne found imitators in the next generation, most
notably his champion Abraham Cowley, and more remotely perhaps, in
the other so-called Metaphysical poets George Herbert, Andrew Marvell,
Thomas Traherne, and Henry Vaughn. But the triumph of neoclassical
poetics in Restoration culture eventually worked against Donne – as
epitomized in Dryden’s famous criticism of Donne’s style, that “he affects
the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where
nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice
speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and
entertain them with the softnesses of love.”33 A whole paradigm shift in
a culture’s poetic sensibility, its instinct for what should and should not be
part of poetry, is encapsulated here. It was a shift of taste that was destined
to decrease Donne’s prestige as a poet during the entire “long” eighteenth
century and well into the nineteenth. 34
But again, Sullivan’s work complicates any simple, one-dimensional
account of this shift in aesthetic taste by documenting that Donne’s poems
found readers and, indeed, publishers in a variety of usually ignored
uncollected printings of Donne’s verse, not only in the first six decades
of the century, but also after the Restoration. His examination of the great
variety of works that included Donne lyrics surprisingly shows that he was
a popular poet throughout the century and found readers among the
nonelite portions of the population, including women, and even young
scholars in grammar schools. Sullivan does not extend his study beyond
the year 1700, but he does show that Donne had many readers well after
Dryden’s critique of him,35 as does A. J. Smith in his John Donne: The
Critical Heritage.
This important qualification does not, however, fundamentally alter the
big picture of a long-term change in the perception of Donne in the
eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson greatly amplified the new taste exem-
plified by Dryden in his much quoted and pejorative remarks on a group
he called (coining the phrase) “the metaphysical poets,” of whom Donne is
the earliest. Johnson, in an opinion that would dominate the reception of
Donne until well into the nineteenth century, wrote, “The metaphysical
poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their only
endeavor; but unluckily, resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing
poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial
of the finger better than that of the ear.”36
Johnson’s opinion was still prevalent in the nineteenth century, despite
the efforts of a few early admirers such as Coleridge, Browning, or (in the
United States) Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. The details can be
studied in an excellent investigation into Donne’s reception in the nine-
teenth century by John Haskin.37 Haskin demonstrates that despite the
strength of the Donne renaissance of the 1920s, it was during the Victorian
era that the tide began to shift, and a Donne revival can be said to have
begun (though climaxing late in the era, in the 1890s) after an approxi-
mately 200-year eclipse.38
This revival, however, turned into a political-aesthetic revolution with
the publication – and subsequent vast influence of – T. S. Eliot’s brief
review of Herbert Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of
the Seventeenth Century (1921). The review was titled “The Metaphysical
Poets” and was first published in the Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 20,
1921: 669–70).39 Thereafter, as Haskin notes, “The vogue for Donne that
arose in the 1890s was superseded in the twentieth century by a sustained
critical scrutiny that led to Donne’s establishment as a major poet.” 40
Eliot’s essay was one of the most prominent signposts of a complex
cultural process through which Donne’s poetry became a major vehicle for
and outcome of the Modernist aesthetic revolution of the twentieth
century – and exemplified precisely what Benjamin means when he wrote:
“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is
present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has
been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation ... The
image that is read – which it to say, the image in the now of its
recognisability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous
critical moment on which all reading is founded.”41 The moment of the
“Modernist Donne” is precisely such a constellation formed by the cultural
products of two eras brought into close juxtaposition, each stimulating the
other. It is a prime example of “dialectics at a standstill” – two cultural
moments in dynamic interaction but focused in one perceptual moment.
T. S. Eliot: Presentist Critic

T. S. Eliot, who serves so often as an example of conventionality and
conservative thinking is, perhaps surprisingly, closer to Walter Benjamin
than to a more academic critic like Rosemund Tuve42 in his evaluation of
the aesthetic paradigm shifts as they impact our reception of Donne’s
poetry. Such a view was already implied, if not stated directly, in his 1921
“The Metaphysical Poets,” when Eliot linked Donne with contemporary
poetry (both the previous generation’s Symbolism and, implicitly, with an
emerging Modernism) – claiming as well, of course, that Donne was a
neglected poetic master whose place in the English poetic tradition deserved
(and of course subsequently got) significant upward revision. But Eliot was
explicit about positing a link between Donne and Eliot’s early models, the
minor French Symbolists Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière, said to be
“nearer to the ‘school of Donne’ than any modern English poet.” And then
(very significantly for our understanding of the limited but definite parallels
between Benjamin and Eliot), he quotes the opening of the last lyric of
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, “Le Voyage,” and claims that Baudelaire,
too, had “the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of
transforming an observation into a state of mind.”43
Benjamin, of course, spent the last decade of his life attempting to
define how Baudelaire was the first to adopt the requisite poetic techniques
to respond to the onset of a consumerist, commercial, capitalist society
that forms the social basis for the entire Modernist movement in the arts,
and he saw Baudelaire as linked to the baroque poetics he had studied in
his The Origin of German Tragic Drama. This is one of the ways Benjamin
seems already to be writing a preface to a study of Donne’s poetic afterlife
and to Donne’s poetry itself.
In Eliot’s alluding to Laforgue and Corbière, however, I think it is fair to
say, we can see a self-reference on Eliot’s part, an implied claim that his
own poetic practice partakes in the unified sensibility and the complex
problematic striving for unity of the materials of nonpoetic reality that he
identifies for both Donne and the Symbolists. Who can doubt that Eliot
has his own work in mind when he writes, “Our civilization comprehends
great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing
upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.
The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive,
more indirect, on order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his
meaning.”44 Implicitly then, Eliot, as he did for his French models, claims
in effect to be “nearer to the ‘School of Donne’” than other English poets.
A similar sentiment appears in his 1926 Clark lectures at Cambridge,
when in the opening Eliot acknowledges the recent growth of new interest
in seventeenth-century poetry and states that his own point of view is that
of a craftsman of verse, “centred in the present and the immediate future,”
and avows that he “studies the literature of the past in order to learn how
he should write in the present.”45 The lectures elaborate many of the
briefly sketched ideas of “The Metaphysical Poets” essay and identify three
different eras of “metaphysical poetry” (and unified sensibility): the age of
Dante, the age of Donne, and the age of the French Symbolists, with each
moment getting extensive treatment as the lectures unfold.
Returning to issues of his connection to Donne some five years later,
writing for the critical tribute to Donne on the 300th anniversary of his
death, Eliot is again quite specific in tying the new appreciation of Donne’s
poetry to the artistic and poetic movements of the early twentieth century.
Eliot does, to be sure, make protests that he indeed believes in absolute
standards of taste and that there is more than “capricious fashion” behind
the critical rankings of the various poets; there will be, he claims, “some
Final Judgment Day, on which the poets will be assembled in their ranks
and orders.” But then Eliot adds: “At any particular time, and we exist only
in particular moments of time, good taste consists, not in attaining to the
vision of Judgment Day, and still less in assuming that what happens to be
important for us now is certainly what will be important in the same way
on that occasion, but in approximating to some analysis of the absolute
and the relative in our own appreciation.”46 It’s hard to be sure how
seriously to take the reference to a Final Aesthetic Judgment Day. It is
an open question how Eliot might have responded to a very similar
observation of Benjamin on this issue of the relation of the past to a given
present: “Of course, only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its
past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become
citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à
l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment Day.”47 Both writers, lovers of
fragments, longed for redemption and completion in an impossibly frag-
mented present.
Eliot’s off-hand remark may be the germ of the idea behind the
meditations on time and eternity in his 1943 The Four Quartets, but it is
certainly underdeveloped in “Donne in Our Time” – and, as noted, greatly
qualified. At another level, the movement from generalized time to specific
time is reminiscent of another system-undermining dictum from another
theorist of authoritarian bent: “From the first moment to the last, the
lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes,” wrote Louis Althusser, in a
comment on Engels’s view that in Marxism the economic factor is decisive
“in the last instance.”48 There are absolute standards, both statements seem
to say; it’s just that we never get to them.
Certainly, this is not Benjamin’s joyous celebration of the focusing
power of the Jetztzeit, but it is a recognition that aesthetic judgments take
place in the now and are deeply influenced by the perceiver’s present.
And it continues, and amplifies, Eliot’s previous claims for Donne’s
relation to the Modernist moment. We can see something similar
in spirit, if quite different in its (largely biography-based) analysis, in
Virginia Woolfe’s essay on Donne in 1931.49
Benjamin’s Correction of the Anglo-American Modernist Donne

Eliot perhaps remained the most important Donne critic in terms of
immediate impact, but much of the reception of Donne over the following
decades depended on a group of more academic critics who used Donne’s
poetry to develop techniques of close reading that became vehicles for
promoting the study and appreciation of Donne and methods that helped
professionalize the new discipline of English studies in the twentieth
century: the New Critics.
Besides Eliot, the big names in the critical revolution that helped propel
Donne to the status of major poet are I. A. Richards, William Empson,
and Cleanth Brooks. The first two were, respectively, architect and prod-
uct of the revolutionary English department at Cambridge University in
the post–World War I era, which invented close reading and (what came
to be known as) New Criticism. Cleanth Brooks was one of four leading
American New Critics at first centered at Vanderbilt University in Nash-
ville, Tennessee. But Brooks had studied in Britain at Oxford, discovered
the ideas of I. A. Richards, and brought back his methods to his group in
the United States, one that had already been thinking along similar lines.50
All wrote centrally on Donne and championed him in several ways – in
teaching, in critical essays, and in textbook writing. Through their influ-
ence and that of their many followers, Donne became a central figure of
the Modernist aesthetic revolution of the 1920s and beyond and was a
major vehicle for the revolution in the evaluation of poetic language and
technique that allowed for the development of Modernist poetry in the
first half of the twentieth century.
This New Critical championing of Donne, I would argue, is related to
the Modernist-baroque constellation that Benjamin noted in defining the
connections of the baroque (with its antirealist aesthetic techniques and
emotional extremes) to early twentieth-century German Expressionist art
and literature,51 to the epic theater of his friend Bertolt Brecht,52 and,
centrally, to the poetic techniques of the father of literary Modernism,
Charles Baudelaire.53
While Benjamin’s study of seventeenth-century German drama was
clearly connected to the Modernist moment of the 1920s (displaying, as
we have seen, many commonalities with the Anglo-American Modernist
discovery of Metaphysical poetry), there were significant differences
between Benjamin’s theory and practice and those of the Anglo-
Americans. This became even clearer when in the 1930s he turned to a
sustained study of the father of Modernist poetry, Charles Baudelaire,
and the socioeconomic forces that helped form Baudelaire’s work. Like
T. S. Eliot, he saw a connection between baroque and Symbolist literature.
But he defined this connection primarily in terms of a common use in
both eras of allegory – allegory in the special sense he defined in his
Trauerspiel book, putting aside the traditional associations of the term
with the idea of narrative connections and instead putting emphasis on
melancholy, an empty world, and fragmented forms resistant to unity
(I will discuss these in more detail in the following chapters). In this
emphasis, he departed radically from mainstream Anglo-American critical
notions, which by and large emphasized in Donne a troubled but usually
successful search for aesthetic unity. Benjamin instead thought that “In the
field of allegorical intuition, the image is a fragment, a rune ... The false
appearance of totality is extinguished.”54
Brooks was perhaps the most explicit in making unity a central critical
principle, as can be seen, for example, in his classic essay on Donne in The
Well Wrought Urn:
For us today, Donne’s imagination seems obsessed with the problem of

unity: the sense in which the lovers become one – the sense in which the
soul is united with God. Frequently, as we have seen, one type of unity
becomes a metaphor for the other. It may not be too far-fetched to see both
as instances of and metaphors for, the union which the creative imagination
itself effects ... Coleridge has of course given us the classic description of its
nature and power.55
Brooks then goes on to quote and paraphrase Coleridge’s celebrated

definition of the symbol, famously contrasted as living and organic, as
against a lifeless and mechanical allegory – an instance of “Imagination”
rather than of a lesser, mechanical “Fancy.” He thus assimilates Donne’s
central figures in the poem (and the Metaphysical conceit more generally)
to the classic status of Romantic unity. This supposition is, as I have already
intimated and will discuss further below in some detail, the direct opposite
of Benjamin’s analysis of the baroque allegory of the seventeenth century.
Empson is, as might be expected, a more complicated Donne critic, but
I think it is fair to say that only in his seventh or last “type” of ambiguity
does he come near to Benjamin’s diagnosis of baroque dissonance. In that
chapter, he defines a “fully divided mind,” invoking Freud’s idea of
the unconscious. He gives many small examples rather than looking at
complete poems, and Donne is little noted there. Most of the criticism of
Donne in Seven Types of Ambiguity is to be found in chapter 4, in which
“the alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of
mind in the author.”56 The Donne poem criticized at length there is
“A Valediction of Weeping,” and characteristically (and very much against
the grain of Cleanth Brooks’s disdain for biographical criticism), Empson
wants to situate the poem at a specific moment of Donne’s life: he thinks it
was written just before Donne left for the Essex expedition of 1596.
As for the third of these pioneers, I. A. Richards was less a critical
theorist than he was an empiricist investigator of poetic perception –
perhaps, as Chanita Goodblatt argued at the 2015 Reconsidering Donne
Conference at Lincoln College, Oxford, something of a Gestalt psycholo-
gist.57 In the running experiment of his English classes at Cambridge in the
years leading up to the publication of the results of his researches in the
1929 Practical Criticism, he distributed copies of a poem to a class of
undergraduates, the poem unaccompanied by information on its author
or date. The students were asked to explain why they liked or disliked the
poems in an assignment handed in a week after the distribution. In the
analysis and discussion of the results that make up the book, Richards
makes it clear that he believes each poem has a sense and that students are
either correct or incorrect in fathoming it. And he catalogs a long list of
mistakes, false assumptions, irrelevant states of mind, and so on that he
believes are interfering with each student’s encounters with the poems.58
Today, this sounds like a set of bad examples from the Authoritarian
Classroom, but putting this aside, what Richards had done was to invent
the first version of New Critical close reading, and from the first Donne’s
poetry is part of it. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 7 (“At the round earth’s
imagined corners blow”) appears as Poem 3 of the study. And it is clear
in his comments that he believes in a complex but unitary meaning for this
and other poems.
In short, then, the Anglo-American critics of the Modernist Donne were
unifiers, while Benjamin was a fragmenter. The import of this difference –
which in some ways is a matter of emphasis, since the dialectic formed
between the whole and its parts is always complex and open to interpret-
ation – became fully clarified only in the Postmodernist era and with the
advent of deconstructive criticism. The passage from Coleridge casually
evoked by Cleanth Brooks to help define Donne’s unity itself became a
major target of criticism in the Benjamin-influenced writings of Paul de
Man in the heyday of the Yale Critics.59 De Man’s critique of Coleridge’s
deprecation of allegory then became a standard poststructuralist and
Postmodernist idea. Because of this, and because of some other issues to be
noted in due course, Benjamin’s work is not only a product of the
Modernism of the 1920s but prescient in important ways of the poststruc-
turalist ideas of the recent past. A Benjaminian interpretation would
necessarily reproduce aspects of the Modernist Donne, but on the crucial
question of the unity of the Metaphysical conceit and of the poems more
generally, it would be resolutely tilted toward the side of fragmentation,
disunity, and Postmodernism.
The Baroque and Donne

While the British and American New Critics developed close reading as the
technique they thought was best suited for the study of Donne, an entirely
different approach to him sprang up in Germany and Italy and eventually
became widespread, even developing a following in the United Kingdom
and United States. It was one based on a concept borrowed from art history
and art criticism applied to the study of literature: the definition and
development of a concept of a literary baroque. This was in fact the context
in which Benjamin worked out the details of his analysis of the German
seventeenth-century Trauerspiele in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
In that work, Benjamin mostly takes the term “baroque” for granted and
does not provide a definition of it, but he certainly assumes it and explicitly
situates himself in the context of an extensive, mostly German discussion of
this term. His theory of the baroque allegory is in fact a contribution to the
discussion of the nature of baroque aesthetics. But the term has had a
complex provenance. “Baroque” had been specifically borrowed from visual
art history for use in literary studies in the late nineteenth century,60 but the
literature on it had already become extensive as Benjamin worked on his
book in the mid-1920s. Benjamin cites most of the major works of the
literature in the course of his discussion and assumes throughout the much
debated position that the term designates an aesthetic period that followed
that of the Renaissance, mostly in the seventeenth century, and that this
period should not be seen, as Jacob Burckhardt famously had it, as a period
of degeneracy from a Renaissance highpoint, but was instead an aesthetic
period whose works had their own value and aesthetic structures worthy of
respect and study.61 And as Jane Newman argues in detail, Benjamin
supported the idea that the baroque was also a style that specifically had a
long influence on and afterlife within the German literary tradition.62
As already mentioned, Benjamin himself linked his interest in the bar-
oque with the development of art and literature in early twentieth-century
Germany in Expressionism, and this connection became a commonplace
one as the discussion developed.63 In retrospect, it seems to be a German
parallel to the link established between Donne’s poetry and Modernism in
the United States and United Kingdom by T. S. Eliot and myriads of
followers. But just what is the connection between the two separate
nomenclatures of “Metaphysical” and “baroque” poetry? In Chapter 4,
I will argue that the term “Metaphysical” in this context is an arbitrary and
somewhat happenstance coinage that became accepted for want of a better
term in English literary history. “Baroque,” in contrast, while like every
such term having its own history of chance and association, is international
in application and well accepted in international art history and in the
literary histories of Spain, Italy, and Germany – and several others,
according to René Wellek’s classic article on the subject, to which I will
turn shortly. The crucial problem (noted by numerous writers on the
subject) is that the term “baroque” became, as its usage proliferated, more
a cluster of associations and judgments than a clear concept of its own.
There are numerous issues surrounding it that ask for clarification. Is it, for
example, as some critics claim, the more or less official aesthetic paradigm
of the Catholic Counter-Reformation? Or does it contain a vigorous
Protestant strain as well? Is it a style, an aesthetic period, or both? If it is
a style, is it a more or less universal aspect of aesthetic traditions world-
wide, or is it to be found in some countries but not in others? Is it a
positive or derogatory term? These and more issues have been debated now
for over a century, and there is little consensus even today. Gregg Lambert
argues that such a debate is, in principle, interminable, if only because, “In
the case of the baroque, it has no other mode of existence than expression,
particularly by those who persist in expressing or evoking its name even if
only to deny it. Because the baroque is potentially an ‘empty category,’ it
has often played havoc with the empirical assumptions as the basis of
historical narration.”64 This, it must be emphasized, is an observation
made in introducing what the author sees as a palpable revival of the
baroque in Postmodernist culture, even though for a long time after the
advent of the Postmodernist critical revolution, the baroque seemed to
have disappeared. But I will return to these developments below.
The Baroque in Anglo-American Literary Studies

The term “baroque” was originally a pejorative, usually used in the context
of discussions of art and architecture, to mean something like over-
decorated, absurd, or grotesque. As it evolved into the idea of a specific
phase of Western art, those negative connotations at first came with it.
Jacob Burckhardt used the term in his 1860 The Civilization of the Renais-
sance in Italy to convey his judgment that the art following the Italian High
Renaissance was degenerative and decadent. In a few decades, however, the
term evolved into a more neutral one, designating an aesthetic or cultural
period of seventeenth-century Europe with a specific style and, even for
some critics, a specific worldview. It eventually became a central term in
the field of art history for the period following the Renaissance and in turn
giving way to Neoclassicism.
The first critic to suggest the term might be applied to literary studies
was the German Heinrich Wölfflin, in his 1888 Renaissance und Barock.65
In his discussion of the history of Italian painting, Wölfflin developed a
contrast between a “classical” Renaissance (epitomized by Raphael and
Leonardo) and a “baroque” period of artists such as Tintoretto and
Caravaggio that followed and established stylistic differences from the
High Renaissance. In a highly influential argument reproduced multiple
times in the literature that followed, he held that it was a matter not just of
differing styles but of “two different ways of seeing the world” that
produced two styles. The baroque was “painterly” rather than “linear” or
“planar”; that is, it attempted to manifest movement rather than solidity. It
organized the painting’s space through a continuous recessionality rather
than as a series of planes. And the baroque attempted to show the thing in
its changeability rather than as a solid “thing in itself.” 66
Later in the same work Wölfflin himself applied the concept to litera-
ture in a contrast, between Tasso (baroque) and Ariosto (Renaissance),
organized along synesthetic versions of the defining characteristics of the
baroque-Renaissance binary he had worked out for painting and architec-
ture. Several subsequent German scholars also applied the concept of the
baroque to English literature in a variety of different ways in a develop-
ment that, we have seen, set the stage for Benjamin’s study of the baroque
allegory. The idea of a literary baroque period was enthusiastically taken up
by Spanish and Italian scholars and soon many others far beyond.67
But in the English-speaking world, the reception of the idea was
decidedly mixed. The essential story between 1946 (the publication date
of Wellek’s essay) and, say, 1985 (the approximate date for the beginning of
the hegemony of theoretical approaches in American literary studies) is
one in which a few eminent, multilingual, often European scholars trans-
planted to America or England argue that the concept of the baroque – as
period, as style, as worldview – is an essential one for the mapping of
seventeenth-century English literary history and for understanding its
relation to the rest of Europe in the same period. But they do so in a field
that, while not exactly ignoring them, never adopts their “full program”
but incorporates the concept of the baroque as mostly a stylistic and
thematic descriptor that becomes part of the terminological arsenal within
the discourse on seventeenth-century literary studies – but hardly a
central concept. As we will see, one of those eminent scholars
I referred to above, René Wellek, concedes that this has been the fate of
the term in his 1962 retrospective essay on the subject. Of the four most
prominent proponents of the baroque in the English-speaking world in the
immediate postwar years – Wellek, Wylie Sypher, Mario Praz, and Frank
J. Warnke – Wellek is, I believe, the most important and influential figure
and will get most of my attention here. I will discuss Sypher briefly below
in conjunction with his essay on Donne and Milton, and Praz and Warnke
as bookends, as it were, for the case of Wellek. After that necessary
exposition, I will turn to the issue of how the discussion of the baroque
figured in Donne studies more narrowly construed.
The Baroque Comes to England and America

Mario Praz certainly belongs in a list of influential critics who helped bring
the idea of the baroque to the United Kingdom and the United States, but
there are two caveats to get out of the way first in that regard. There is the
issue of how to date his influence in the English-speaking world. He did
his first work on Donne in Italian, and it was published in Florence in
1925, 68 but it seems to have been little noticed outside of Italy at first. That
began to change with his essay in the 1931 Garland for Donne, “Donne and
the Poetry of His Time,”69 which was favorably mentioned by both T. S.
Eliot and H. J. C. Grierson.70 In it Praz argues that Donne was a
revolutionary within the tradition of love poetry, striking out in a new
direction of dramatic intensity, metrical originality, colloquial style, and
“prosaic” imagery. His lady is not the idealized Donna of the Petrarchan
tradition, but “so much of a flesh-and-blood presence, that she can be
invited to ‘act the rest.’”71
And he adds, in a pioneering coupling of Donne and the baroque,
“Donne’s technique stands in the same relation to the average technique of
Renaissance poetry as that of baroque to that of Renaissance painting. His
sole preoccupation is with the whole effect.”72
Praz goes on to try to isolate the uniqueness of Donne, praising
T. S. Eliot’s general idea of Donne’s mastery of “sensuous thought” and
agreeing with him that this is a quality Donne shared with Baudelaire.73
But he thinks these qualities were also evident in contemporaries such as
Marlowe, Shakespeare, Chapman, and the Jacobean dramatists74 – but
that Donne’s best poetry displays this quality far more frequently and
consistently than in the others. He also mentions in passing ideas about
Donne that would become the subject of much later work in the field,
such as his peculiar position between the medieval and the modern, his
anti-Petrarchan Petrarchanism, and his differences from the seventeenth-
century Italian specialist in concetti Giambattista Marino (except, Praz says,
in The Anniversaries). In an insight that has not been much pursued
by later critics, he finds his true Italian peer to be Michelangelo the
sonneteer.75
This piece established Praz as a presence within Donne studies, as did
his later collection of essays on what could be considered the baroque era
of Italian and English literature, The Flaming Heart. His essay on Crashaw
(whom he eventually saw as the true English parallel to Marino rather than
Donne) has also received considerable attention in subsequent years,76 and
his study of the seventeenth-century emblem books of Europe (with its
200-plus page inventory of emblem books throughout European and
American libraries) is a considerable scholarly achievement.77
Donne and his Italian and English parallels were almost sidelines in
Praz’s prodigious bibliography, which contains thousands of items. He is
probably best remembered today less for his work in seventeenth-century
studies than for his The Romantic Agony, a study of what we would now
call the gothic element (or what has been described as the combination of
eroticism and morbidity) in works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
English literature.78 Apparently, in addition, Praz has a considerable
following among students of interior design today. His apartment in Rome
has been converted into a museum open to the public.
It should also be noted that while Praz wrote on Donne and Crashaw’s
connections to baroque aesthetics and baroque analogues in Italian litera-
ture, he did not champion the term “baroque” in the way that Wellek,
Warnke, or Sypher did. He was content to use the term “Metaphysical” on
many occasions (especially in connection with Donne) and to speak
instead of secentismo, concettismo, Marinismo, Gongorismo, and other stylis-
tic terms often associated with the seventeenth-century baroque. In fact, in
a 1962 article in English based on a previous Italian study, Praz argued that
England, even more than France, had been resistant to the baroque
aesthetic in its plastic arts. And Donne, Praz argues on this occasion, is
better called a Mannerist than a baroque poet,79 for despite Donne’s use of
several techniques that could be called baroque, his is a unique case that
does not map well with the full notion of the baroque. And correcting his
earlier statement, Praz states flatly in this essay that Donne has been “called
by misnomer a Baroque poet.”80
This hesitation (or negativity in 1964, as we have just seen) in advocat-
ing the application of the idea of the baroque to English literature in
general and to Donne in particular is in direct contrast to the efforts of
René Wellek, who in 1946 published a milestone article on the term, “The
Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship.” It was a fairly early example
of how Wellek, as a uniquely positioned and sufficiently learned Mitteleur-
opa scholar who had emigrated to the United States, could explain and
adapt European, especially German, thinking on literary studies to an
American audience. He was to produce similar treatments of Romanticism
and Classicism and then go on to a long and fruitful career in the world of
English studies and comparative literature in mid-century America.
Wellek spoke Czech and German in his early childhood in Vienna. He
moved with his family to Prague at about the age of seventeen and began
studying English. As well as pursuing his doctorate at Charles University in
Prague, Wellek became in the years 1930–35, in the words of his biographer
Martin Bucco, “a junior member of the famous Prague Linguistic Circle.”
He was particularly interested in the work of Viktor Shklovsky, Roman
Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, and Roman Ingarden, Bucco reports.81 Today
the Prague Circle is best known for its pioneering work in developing
Ferdinand Saussure’s structuralist linguistics into tools for analyzing and
understanding literature, but it also included members such as Ingarden,
whose proclivities were more in the direction of phenomenology. Wellek
was clearly interested in structuralist theory, but he seems not to have
assimilated it for his own critical work. Rather, he saw himself as a
European philologist who took from the work of the Prague Circle
primarily an understanding of the need for professional rigor and clear
methodological principles. He resisted being pigeon-holed into any spe-
cific school, and in the twilight of his career defended the American New
Critics from attacks by structuralists and poststructuralists.82
This championing of professional rigor and methodology served him
well when he accepted in 1939 a one-year position (it later morphed into a
seven-year stay) at the University of Iowa and slowly began to meet and
impress American literary critics. In the day’s battle between positivist
literary historians and the more value-centered close readings of the
emerging New Criticism, Wellek, a longtime antipositivist notwithstand-
ing his strong advocacy of evidence and rigor, sided with the New Critics.
He met and became professional allies with leading New Critics William
K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren at the
English Institute in the 1940s.83 His career burgeoned from there, and he
became a full professor at Yale starting in 1947, founded the Yale Compara-
tive Literature program, and became a well-known critic and scholar
celebrated for his erudition – and, it almost goes without saying, his
professionalism. Along with the New Critics and most other professors
of the era, he promoted an apolitical role for literary studies in the
academy, even while advocating certain humanistic values in the process.
He specialized, in effect, in bringing his knowledge of Germanistics and
Czech linguistics to his own critical syntheses in the new environment of
American mid-century academia. He was thus perfectly positioned to help
bring the largely German idea of the baroque to American literary criticism
at mid-century.
Wellek comes to the task in a very definite spirit of moderation in his
1946 essay. He deplores critics who praise “even the most grotesque and
tortured forms of baroque art.” He noted several attempts (like Benja-
min’s, though he never mentions him) of seeing the literary baroque as
sharing many features of early twentieth-century Expressionism and labels
this comparison a “misunderstanding” though one connected to a “genu-
ine change of taste, a sudden comprehension for an art despised before.”84
On the other hand, Wellek emphasizes the widespread use of the term
across many national literatures and its strong establishment as both a
stylistic and a period term in histories of art, architecture, and music.
Noting the proliferation of its applications by a myriad of different critics,
he proposes to separate the chaff from the wheat and “recommend those
[meanings] which seem to us most useful, that is, which best clarify the
complexity of the historical process.”85 The task is complicated because it
entails at least three different dimensions of meaning: “the extension of the
term, the valuation it implies on the part of the speaker, and its actual
referent.” At the end of a long discussion, in which he expresses frustration
with the multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings of the term, he draws
back from a complete rejection of the process of definition and writes,
In spite of the many ambiguities and uncertainties ... of the term, baroque
has fulfilled and is still fulfilling an important function. It has put the
problem of periodization and of a pervasive style very squarely; it has
pointed to the analogies between the literatures of the different countries
and between the several arts. It is still the one convenient term which refers
to the style which came after the Renaissance but preceded actual Neo-
Classicism. For a history of English literature the concepts seems especially
important since there the very existence of such a style has been obscured by
the extension given to the term Elizabethan and by the narrow limits of the
one competing traditional term: “metaphysical” ... Whatever the defects of
the term baroque – and I have not been sparing in analyzing them – it is a
term which prepares for synthesis, draws our minds away from the mere
accumulation of observations and facts, and paves the way for a future
history of literature as a fine art.86
What is at stake here is whether literary history can be more accurate,
evidence-based, and precise – but also more philosophical. In this way,
too, like Benjamin in all his phases, Wellek thinks it is crucial for literary
studies to use philosophy as a means to develop its concepts. His answer to
the question of whether the term “baroque” is useful in English literary
history is that of a transplanted lover of traditional German literary studies
wanting to bring its habits of synthesis, philosophical reasoning, and
awareness of the Spirit of the Age to a much more empirical, antitheore-
tical set of (Anglo-American) colleagues.
Despite his fruitful alliance with specific American scholars,87 however,
he never succeeded in making the baroque a pervasive critical concept, as
he more or less conceded in a 1962 “Postscript” to the 1946 article:
The hope of the usefulness of the term in English literary studies I expressed
has not been fulfilled. Not that the word is not used much more frequently
than two decades ago, but precisely its importance for drawing English
seventeenth-century Literature together in a unity, by stressing the continu-
ity from Donne to Dryden, its affinity with similar Continental trends, and
its analogy with developments in the fine arts, has not been recognized very
widely.88
But it was precisely this notion of using the idea of a baroque period
comprising most of the seventeenth century that Frank Warnke revived in
his 1972 Versions of Baroque:
Viewing European literary history as a whole, we can, I believe, see that the
works of Donne, Milton, Corneille, Gryphius, Vondel, Marino, Góngora,
and Calderón, radically different as they are from one another, differ far
more significantly from the works of Ariosto, Ronsard, and Spenser in the
age preceding and from the works of Dryden, Pope, Voltaire, and Lessing
in the age following.89
Warnke goes on to criticize Wylie Sypher for in effect being overly fine in
his view of “stages” of Renaissance style and for not demarcating clearly
enough a distance between the Renaissance and the baroque age. He sees
the various arguments for an intermediate “Mannerism” between Renais-
sance and baroque as also blurring the distinction, and instead, he endorses
Wellek’s more professionally rigorous idea of a literary period that defines a
combination of styles within an overarching set of unified cultural assump-
tions. For Warnke, the overarching baroque period comprised two related
but distinct styles: the “spare, witty, intellectual trend” of Donne, Que-
vedo, Huygens, and Sponde (which, he adds, we can call “Mannerist” if we
must) and the “ornate, exclamatory, emotional and extravagant trend” of
Crashaw, Marino, Góngora, and (Benjamin’s much cited) Gryphius,
which can be called “High Baroque.”90
Warnke goes on to discuss a great variety of Continental and English
writers in thematic clusters: appearance and reality, contradiction, the
world as theater, art as play, and so on, thus producing both a list of
baroque techniques and themes as well as a cross-European roster of
literary artists who fit his definition of the baroque. It is a sophisticated
and polished achievement in the best traditions of professional compara-
tive literature.
Not surprisingly, the book was fairly widely reviewed in established
journals interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature:
Modern Philology, Modern Language Review, Renaissance Quarterly, The
Yale Review, Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Criti-
cism, and one journal devoted to Spanish studies, Revista Hispanica Mod-
erna. Perhaps surprisingly it was also reviewed in Diacritics, a new journal
at this time mostly devoted to critical theory. The reviews, taken together,
give telling information about the status of the concept of the baroque at
that moment in the wider field.
To be sure, Warnke was generally credited for his erudition, intelli-
gence, and deftness in writing and organization. “His combination of
linguistic command, wide knowledge, and intellectual perception is excep-
tional among American scholars,” wrote Robert T. Petersson91 in a com-
ment typical of most of the reviews. But more telling, every review had its
“but” moment. In this case, Petersson added, “There are questions to raise
about method, definition, and occasional interpretation (especially of
Milton, I think).” The first two issues, of course, were at the very center
of the book’s argument, not minor or peripheral matters. And this was
among the least strenuous of the critiques.
For some, the whole enterprise of attempting to define a concept or
period-concept of the baroque had shown itself to be a failure despite
the relative excellence of Warnke’s book: “The problem with the term
‘baroque’ in literary studies, at least as it is usually applied, is that it has
been – and still is – terribly vague. One critic’s baroque is another’s
mannerism ... as Miss [Rosemund] Tuve recognized. There is, however, a
more basic difficulty ... When a literary scholar-critic refers to a poem or
literary work – an artifact made up of words, of sentences, language,
sounds – as baroque, what can or does he mean?”92 The reviewer goes to
list what is largely a summary of the problems of applying the concept of
baroque to literature that Wellek had enumerated thirty-two years previ-
ously – and (at least in this reviewer’s mind) that are still unanswered: “How
many mansions does the house of baroque include? In the long run, all this
may be idle conjecture, for the furnaces of the baroque industry are now
stoked so high that there is little fear they will even cool. One can only hope
that from them will come some first-grade, tempered steel.” Indeed, Cirillo
remarks, “Soon we shall be confronted by the revelation that Chaucer is a
baroque poet, or, at the very least, a precursor of the baroque.”93
Another critic praises the book as a “well written study” with many
excellent qualities but begs to differ with Warnke’s subordination of
“Mannerist” to baroque and its neglect of Marcel Raymond’s La Poésie
Française et le Maniérisme. That is, another of the book’s major propos-
itions is found wanting, even though the book itself is highly praised for its
compositional and intellectual qualities.94
There is a definite sense of impatience with the “baroque industry” or
the “baroquists” tout court in the reviews. Rosalie Colie, although like the
others praising the book’s intellectual qualities, was skeptical of the book’s
overall project of establishing the category of the baroque, declaring that
the attempt to see the baroque as a period is “something that is (probably)
impossible both logically and empirically.”95
Warnke’s book thus seems to mark the end of an era. At least I am not
aware of any further major English-language books in literary studies
devoted to arguing the case of a baroque literary period in the seventeenth
century. There were certainly more books,96 but none got the notice
Warnke’s did – and Warnke’s, as we saw, was treated largely as a kind of
last hurrah for this kind of effort. Nowhere is this more clear than in the
review of the book that appeared in Diacritics in 1972 by Elias L. Rivers.
After a brief introduction raising some of the “meta-” questions alluded
to in his title (How much of an anatomy of criticism is desirable? How can
we create meaningful literary periods when it’s so hard to be precise about
dating them? What can we do about a lack of consensus on basic issues like
the baroque?), Rivers gives a longer-than-average summary of Warnke’s
argument from a Hispanist’s point of view – and also from the point of
view of one who has tasted some of the early fruits of a critical movement
that (as could not be known for certain in 1972) would be the dominant
one in literary studies for the next several years: deconstruction:
Warnke’s book can be recommended to anyone who needs an Anglo-
American introduction, or conclusion, to readings in Baroque poetry. Once
more the Yale schools of “new criticism” and of comparative literature, led
by Cleanth Brooks and René Wellek, have demonstrated their competence
and usefulness.
Is this enough? Can one still write as though Derrida had never written?
Obviously, one can; but we are occasionally made uneasy by the tacitness of
the assumptions underlying a book such as Warnke’s.97
On the one hand, for many, even in the 1970s, Warnke and the idea of the
baroque seemed too speculative, too Continental, too against the grain of
an abstraction-fearing, Lockean Anglo-American literary culture. On the
other hand, as a theory in the wake of Derrida, it seemed too naive, too
positivist – not nearly “meta-” enough. It was in many ways the end of the
line – at least until enough time passed before these issues could be
reconsidered in different theoretical contexts, as we will see below.
The Baroque in Donne Studies

To test this overall view of the fortunes of the idea of baroque in Anglo-
American studies in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I want
to review quickly how the term appears specifically in Donne studies in
this era. Fortunately, all four volumes of John R. Roberts’s John Donne: An
Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism 1912 through 2008 are avail-
able online and make such a survey relatively straightforward.98
One striking result is that there are no articles of Donne criticism whose
abstracts use the word “baroque” until 1931, and the first three articles that
do use the term in the period 1931–35 are in German and are published in
German-speaking countries. It is clear that the concept of the baroque in
Donne studies is a German import and originates in the extensive critical
literature on the term that began in the late nineteenth century and has
continued with ups and downs in the German-speaking world ever since.
This is of course the tradition that Benjamin inserted himself into in his
Trauerspielbuch – though he took it far beyond the territory his predeces-
sors had mapped.
The first catalogued English-language critical essay on Donne that views
him as a baroque poet is a four-page essay contrasting Donne and Crashaw
as English baroque poets.99 A more substantive effort by a non-Germanic
critic appears only in 1944, when Wylie Sypher writes in the independent
left-wing journal (with a complicated and varied political history) Partisan
Review.100 Sypher was an American English professor and public intellectual
who wrote extensively on connections between art and literature and was a
champion of applying the concept of the baroque to English literature. In
this article he sees both Donne and Milton as English baroque poets and
defends Milton against recent “depreciation” (naming T. S. Eliot’s negative
assessments as well as unnamed others), arguing that in fact “Milton is the
greatest of the baroque poets.”101 It is a distinguished, intellectually serious
effort – obviously borrowing from German efforts in the same direction that
proceeded it. It shares many assumptions with Wellek and Warnke, both of
whose major writings on the issue followed it; it was criticized in passing by
Warnke and mentioned in passing by Wellek. Much more than Warnke,
however, it follows Wölfflin in borrowing directly from the criticism of the
plastic arts, showing ways in which the baroque qualities of such painters as
Caravaggio or Rubens have their analogues in the poetry of a host of late
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets, from the Sidney circle,
through Shakespeare and the Jacobean dramatists, the Metaphysicals, the
Cavaliers, Milton, and finally Dryden. Donne emerges as a great baroque
poet, if one somewhat limited in range, especially compared with Milton.
Sypher would go on both to extend and to modify this argument in his
major work of 1955, Four Stages of Renaissance Style, which defined a series of
connected styles for what we would call the early modern period from
Renaissance (Spenser, early Shakespeare) to Mannerism (Donne, the
Jacobean dramatists, early Milton) to Baroque (Crashaw, Paradise Lost) to
Late Baroque (Dryden, Racine).102
After Sypher’s article (but probably under the influence of Wellek’s
1946 article rather than Sypher’s), the volume of discussion seems to
increase, but no consensus is evident. The German connection of the
concept is apparent in two comparativist articles by Werner J. Milch. The
first sees important parallels between German baroque writers and Donne
and Ben Jonson (who are seen as Metaphysicals).103 The next year, an
article in German with a similar theme appeared.104
The twenty years after the end of World War II also saw the develop-
ment of a debate about whether the term “Mannerism” better captured
Donne’s style than did “baroque” – and also whether or how to distinguish
among Renaissance, Mannerist, baroque, and high baroque. This debate
may have been influenced by the translation into English of a major
French study by Odette de Mourgues in 1953 that argued for clear
differentiation between the three related terms metaphysical, baroque,
and the French précieux. She saw Donne as a “metaphysical” and found
a parallel metaphysical “line” of little-remembered French sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century poets.105
Related to this or not, E. B. O. Borgerhoff published a brief article in
Comparative Literature in the same year addressing the controversy about
the terms “baroque” and “Mannerism,” saying both have their uses.106 But
Lowry J. Nelson classified Donne as baroque without qualifications, while
Daniel B. Nelson attempted to distinguish Mannerism from Renaissance
and baroque aesthetics, seeing Donne as Mannerist.107 And Frank Warnke
in this period experimented with variations on the distinctions he would
ultimately make in his synthesizing 1972 book on the European baroque
discussed above.
The 1970s were the years that saw structuralism, phenomenology,
feminism, Marxism, and other anti-New Critical literary trends begin
to affect the larger field of literary studies, but they are scarce in the
literature on Donne in the period 1968–78. There were three entries that
labeled themselves “Marxist” and were largely deflating treatments of
Donne; two used the term “feminist,” and one used “structuralist.” There
was none referencing Derrida or deconstruction. But the discussion of
the baroque continued, with at least thirteen different books or articles
discussing the term. In some cases “baroque” appeared to be on the brink
of wider acceptability. Frank Kermode made “Baroque” one of the five
major headings organizing his anthology of criticism The Metaphysical
Poets,108 and Warnke in 1972 published his major book Versions of
Baroque on the subject as previously discussed. Several essays used the
term “baroque” as a way to discuss Donne’s poetic qualities.109 And two
anthologies of baroque poetry with substantial introductory essays
appeared.110 Elaine Hoover defined the link through a common baroque
aesthetic and sensibility shared by Donne and his Spanish contemporary
Francisco de Quevedo.111 There was also a thoughtful and well-argued
book on the related topic of Donne as a Mannerist poet by Murray
Roston in 1974.112
A sign of a different mentality, more skeptical of the kind of literary
history and concept formation behind most of these theories of a baroque
aesthetic period, however, was evident in a 1972 article by Rosalie Colie,
“‘All in Peeces’: Problems of Interpretation in Donne’s Anniversary
Poems.” Colie questions the criterion of organic unity that had been
assumed in theories of the baroque and in American New Criticism alike.
In this Colie was drawing from her earlier study of Donne’s and other
seventeenth-century writers’ penchant for contradictory and fragmented
forms, the 1966 Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Para-
dox, to which I return briefly in Chapter 3.113
Changing Tides?
The decade of the 1970s, then, appears retrospectively to be the high-water
mark in English studies of what we could call traditional arguments for the
baroque as defined in René Wellek’s milestone 1946 article: arguments for
an integrated seventeenth-century, pan-European literary period that
included England, with specific, if varied stylistic and thematic character-
istics. In the period 1980–95 this trend continued but slowed down with
only six new articles or books that follow up on the idea of Donne as a
baroque and/or Mannerist artist.114 Although in the field of early modern
literature generally this was the era of the development and rise to prom-
inence of the new historicism and cultural materialism (and saw the
appearance of Thomas Docherty’s 1986 John Donne, Undone, to which
I will return below), the discussion of the baroque in Donne studies over
this time was little affected by these developments. Two articles on the
subject show some use of the new critical consciousness. John Steadman’s
Redefining a Period Style is a wholesale reinvestigation of the idea of the
three related period labels (Renaissance, Mannerist, and baroque) that
questions their adequacy due to the complexities of the great diversity of
literary texts they try to encompass.115 And Ruth Crispin evinces a new
consciousness of the processes of literary canonization in an argument
tracing the difficulties both Donne and Góngora have historically had in
being accepted as full members of their nations’ literary canons – and
suggesting that they and other baroque masters have often had a kind of
“outsider” status within their national literatures.
At this point, then, the status of baroque is one of an older, and aging,
critical methodology that appears to be losing relevance within the critical
discussion of the larger field. And even at its high point in the 1970s, the
term “baroque” never caught on in Anglo-American literary culture to the
extent it did, say, in Germany and in the Spanish-speaking world. And it
was never institutionalized in the United States or United Kingdom in
discussions of literary periods as it has been in the history of painting. In
the current Norton Anthology of English Literature – to take one powerful
expression of US academic cultural consensus – early modern English
literature is (as it has been for a long time) split up chronologically into
“The Sixteenth Century (1485–1603),” “The Early Seventeenth Century
(1603–1660),” and “The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
(1660–1785).” “Baroque” does not appear in the glossary of literary termin-
ology, but “classical, classicism, classic” does. And the term “Renaissance”
(but not “baroque”) is used freely in the relevant portions of the various
introductory materials.116
Similarly, a glance at the Program for the 132nd Annual Convention of
the Modern Language Association of America (January 2017) will show that
the terms “Renaissance” and “early modern” can be found in the lists of
sanctioned Forum Sessions, but “baroque” does not. The term does appear,
however, within the names of “Allied Organizations” – significantly in
that of the “Society for German Renaissance and Baroque Literature.”117
In short, “baroque” is and has been a scarce term in the Anglo-American
world up to the present – though, as we will see, this may be changing.
There are only a few hints of such change in the period 1996–2008 – the
most recent years where reliable information on the overall field of Donne
studies is available. Beyond a single article in an electronic foreign outlet,118
the five works that reference the baroque in their abstracts in Roberts’s John
Donne: An Annotated Bibliography use it primarily as the signifier of a
certain style and worldview and abandon attempts to define a baroque
period or even a pan-European baroque movement. In 2000 Peter DeSa
Wiggins published a book that in many ways exemplifies the new histori-
cism of its era, but it does make use of the idea of the baroque. It situates
Donne in the court culture of his early career and relies on Castiglione’s The
Courtier as a way to organize and understand both his social striving and his
poetry writing. It is a combination that Wiggins sees as leading to poems
that are “versions of the literary baroque.”119 Here, as elsewhere in recent
years, the baroque is primarily a formal or stylistic concept, but one, as in
the case of Benjamin and other social-minded critics, that expresses the
peculiar situations of its age. Gilles Mathis varies this in seeing the baroque
as stylistic and formalist in its functions,120 while Angus Fletcher views it as
a style expressive of changing notions of time, space, and motion.121
Perhaps most clearly a sign of its time, however, is a 2003 essay by
Catherine Gimelli Martin that combines a basically deconstructive
approach to textual reading with a new historicist diagnosis of the revealed
dissonances in the culture of anxiety Donne inhabited as he attempted to
forge a career at court – and especially in the religious turmoil within both
his own mind and his society. His poems, she says, are “quintessentially
baroque in supplementing the lost sacramental potency of art with a
displaced aesthetic substitute.”122 It is a position not far from the one
Benjamin argues for in his analysis of the German Trauerspiele.
In recent years in Donne studies, then, “baroque” has become largely a
descriptor of certain stylistic and even ideological features of literary
writing – both style and “worldview.” Contemporary references to the
baroque in Donne studies tend to be stylistic ones, and the stylistic
characteristics adduced often still descend from Wölfflin’s pioneering
efforts (which saw the baroque as manifesting movement rather than
solidity and attempting to show its objects in their changeability rather
than as solids, and so on). In fact, a recent summary of characteristics of
the baroque style by Roland Greene is remarkably consistent with many
other such lists from previous decades:
In artistic terms, the Baroque wields incommensurability as an aesthetic
principle. Against a social background of increasingly ordered knowledge,
articulated state power, and stratified class relations, the sensation of the
incommensurable is that the elements in a structure might escape from
their structuring, might resist resolution into a logic, might prove impos-
sible to measure one against another by a single scale ... The baroque favors
logics that turn back on themselves, dynamic movements, overdeveloped
figuration, and a cultivation of grotesqueness or monstrosity.123
In a reference book article on baroque poetics, Christopher Johnson
supplemented this by noting: “Baroque poetics generally cultivates an
aesthetics of difficulty valuing erudition, ingenuity, and rhetorical excess.”
Example of such ingenuity include for him “rhetorical sophistication,
excess, and play ... Baroque writers challenge conventional notions of
decorum by using and abusing such tropes and figures as metaphor,
hyperbole, paradox, anaphora, hyperbaton, hypotaxis and parataxis, par-
onomasia, and oxymoron. Producing aporia and variety ... is valued, as is
the cultivation of concordia discors and antithesis – strategies often cul-
minating in allegory or the conceit.” 124
These baroque characteristics have tended to be seen as a phenomenon
of the seventeenth century, but not as the dominant aesthetic one, as
Wellek thought it was. In some ways this deemphasis of the baroque is a
result of the Postmodernist critical revolution, as seen in essays such as
Martin’s or Crispin’s – and heard as early as 1972 in the Diacritics review of
Warnke by Elias Rivers. After Derrida and company, the project of
defining a series of stable literary-period concepts – with the baroque
joining established ones such as Renaissance, Romanticism, and Modern-
ism – seemed chimerical. Why bash up against the established hegemony
of Late Renaissance or seventeenth century with the knowledge that such
concepts are arbitrary and always already imperfect and wanting? So the
baroque became instead a sparingly used word to describe an aesthetic
cluster or the qualities of style.
Surprisingly, however, this stasis did not last. Outside of Donne studies
proper, within the larger field of early modern studies, another idea of the
baroque has begun to evolve, and it is firmly anchored in Postmodernist
theory rather than the older paradigms.
A Postmodernist Donne
One problem with the disinterest in the concept of the baroque in the
early Postmodernist era was that it seemed to leave the central idea of
literary history – the literary period – a null category. But literary studies is
organized around the idea of period specializations, so that the structure of
English and other modern language departments and professional organ-
izations depends on period concepts. And at a deeper level, as Fredric
Jameson succinctly put it, “We cannot not periodize.”125 The alternative,
he wrote, is an indifference to cultural moments and their evolution, a
retreat to Henry Ford’s claim that history is just one damn thing after
another. And he presented a highly developed theory of the cultural-
aesthetic period of Postmodernism in a complex relation of break and
continuity with Modernism as a widely admired example of a more
contemporary way of forging a period concept. Several critics of early
modern culture thought that the concept of Postmodernism and its rela-
tion to Modernism had close affinities to an idea of the baroque and its
relation to a preceding Renaissance. Going further, some, like Gilles
Deleuze, argued that Postmodernist aesthetics represents an uncanny echo
of the baroque.126 In short, at this moment of writing a new Postmodernist
version of the concept of the baroque is emerging, and a revival of interest
in Walter Benjamin supplies some of the impetus for it.
Christopher Johnson briefly discusses how the baroque figures for
Postmodernist theory in writers such as Benjamin, Deleuze, Christine
Buci-Glucksmann, and Jacques Lacan – all of whom, he writes, contribute
to a contemporary way of seeing the baroque as characterized by “imma-
nence, aporia, and transcendence” through its various excesses. Perhaps
surprisingly, it has become an issue in Postcolonial theory through various
proposals for a New World baroque developed in complex interactions
with native art and subjectivity.127
Another important theoretical source in the emergence of a contempor-
ary concept of the baroque can be seen in the cluster of issues signified by
the term “political theology.” The term was coined by Benjamin’s right-
wing contemporary Carl Schmitt in several works128 to designate the
process in which early modernity saw the transformation of formerly
theological concepts (e.g., the idea of the King’s preeminent authority)
into secular ones – concepts, however, that retained something of their
theological origins. Schmitt’s ideas have enjoyed a renaissance in recent
years. Victoria Kahn wrote that discovering his writings was like discover-
ing a right-wing member of the Frankfurt School.129 He shared with them
an understanding of the interconnections of cultural domains that trad-
itional disciplinary divisions usually separated, and he focused, like Benja-
min, Adorno, and Horkheimer, on the advent of modernity as a complexly
interconnected cultural process. While they concentrated on philosophy,
economics, sociology, and aesthetics, he looked at the political per se in a
way that no one in the Frankfurt School had really attempted. These were
the qualilties that largely explain Benjamin’s favorable comments on him
in his correspondence and the use of his theory of sovereignty to help
characterize one of the character “types” (the tyrant) of the German
Trauerspiele he studied. And this was in a period before Schmitt joined
the Nazi Party.
However, as this political allegiance suggests, unlike the Frankfurt
School members and associates, Schmitt lacked democratic values and
aspirations for a society of economic and social equality. He was a devotee
of a kind of Realpolitik, arguing, for example, that all politics is based on
the distinction between friends and enemies, and in general he supported
the rights of the “sovereign” over the legislature and popular sovereignty.
He was first a Catholic conservative, later a member of the Nazi Party, and
he refused all attempts at de-nazification in the postwar years.130
Starting in his 1995 Homo Sacer, the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben
became fascinated with Schmitt, finding connections, among others,
between Schmitt’s politics and the phenomenon of the exile and stranger
he delineated in this work.131 Other intellectuals have followed suit: Benja-
min, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and several others have been
brought into the political theology pantheon, and the trend continues to
the present – with most of the writers hostile to Schmitt’s values but highly
taken with his framing of the issues. This trend has to some extent merged
into the “religious turn” taken by so many theorists in the wake of the events
of September 11, 2001, the rise of Islamic extremism, and the ongoing
political stalemates and crises in the West. As Victoria Kahn wrote in her
excellent introduction to The Future of Illusion, “Both in the United States
and Europe, the turn to political theology is a way of talking about the crisis
of liberal democracy” brought on by the ongoing political stalemates and
what many see as the inadequacy of the response to terrorism and the
refugee crisis.132 And it has also become an issue in Shakespeare studies.133
What does it have to do with the baroque? The short answer is that
Schmitt’s focus on the development of ideas of a secular state and the
development of absolutism directs attention to the chief time and place of
the baroque, the seventeenth century in Continental Europe. Benjamin’s
brief allusions to Schmitt in his discussion of baroque drama in The Origin
show one of the earliest examples of this tendency. Philip Lorenz’s The
Tears of Sovereignty is one of the most recent, an attempt to “follow the
tropological formation of sovereignty on the baroque stage.”134 Drawing
significantly from Benjamin (whose work he calls “an inverse theoretical
perspective to Schmitt’s”135) Lorenz shows how the changing conceptual-
izations of sovereignty of the era deeply permeate these political dramas
from England and Spain and constitute the political context that, among
other things, informs baroque aesthetics.
Similarly, Roland Greene sees the development of an expanded concept
of the baroque – one encompassing not only aesthetic forms and themes,
but philosophy and politics as well – in his study of the onset of modern-
ity, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes
(2013), from which I quoted previously.136
Jacques Lacan is also a major theorist who devoted part of one of the
lectures of his Seminar XX to an investigation of baroque aesthetics and
part of another commenting on Bernini’s great statue of St. Theresa. He
is fascinated by the representation of sexuality in so many of the baroque
masterpieces that otherwise portray religious themes.137 In the great
baroque art works of Italy, he says, “Everything is exhibition of the
body evoking jouissance ... but without copulation ... I will go so far as
to tell you that nowhere more blatantly than in Christianity does the
work of art as such show itself as what it has always been in all places –
obscenity.”138
These comments represent at best the seeds of a psychoanalytic theory
of sublimated sexuality as a component of baroque (and general) aesthetics,
but they would require considerable elaboration to achieve this. One writer
has called on Zizek to fill the gap, but to date this has not occurred to my
knowledge.139
A more finished theory of the baroque has been worked out by Gilles
Deleuze, though it lacks a psychoanalytic dimension. His 1988 study Le pli:
Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) is a tour de force
reading of the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) that
argues that his philosophy is structured like baroque artworks. Leibniz
deals in paradoxes and in esoteric, paradoxical concepts such as the
“monad.” One of his basic philosophical moves (which Deleuze calls the
“fold” or “pleat” – in French le plis) is a strategy of preserving unity in
multiplicity – and is a staple of baroque painting, architecture, and
sculpture. His differential calculus represents the infinite in finite equa-
tions – and so on. The book contains, therefore, a description of baroque
aesthetics that applies across the field of the fine arts, originates in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but has aspects that can be found in
the art of several other epochs – including our own. It is a brief but
formidable book. Its ideal reader, translator Tom Conley accurately
reports, is familiar with “atomic theory, differential calculus, classical and
contemporary music, and with the history of logic”140 – and this doesn’t
exhaust the possible list. But it contains numerous insights that, I believe,
complement Benjamin’s theory of the baroque allegory. Indeed, in a
passage I will return to below, he praises Benjamin for his concept of the
allegory as a deep insight into the structure of baroque aesthetics.
Finally, Fredric Jameson, who has done so much to chart the directions
and tendencies of contemporary culture in an exemplary, politically pro-
gressive synthesis, has taken up the issue of the baroque recently as well, in
his wide-ranging essay “Narrative Bodies: Rubens and History,” which sees
the baroque, paradoxically, as constituting the “first secular age,” brought
on because through secularization “religion becomes one worldview
among others, one specialization among many: an activity to be promoted
and sold on the market.” Especially with the competition from Protestant-
ism, Jameson asserts, “The Church decides to advertise and to launch the
first great publicity campaign on behalf of its producer.”141 The result is the
development of one of the main branches of baroque aesthetics. In this
conception the aesthetic already takes on some of the tasks that Benjamin
saw develop in the Belle Epoque Paris of Baudelaire’s poetry. But the
applications of this thesis for Donne mostly involve the religious poetry
and sermons, while the secular love poetry and satires, as we will see, are
largely resistant to these propagandistic functions. And of course Jameson
is far from saying that such functions exhaust the meanings of the great
baroque art he goes on to discuss and praise in the essay.
Multiple Postmodernist Donnes

As the narrative of the baroque I have constructed suggests, the conditions
have developed for a new phase of the Postmodernist period in Donne
studies. We are long past the moment of the Modernist Donne, which
ceased because of the usual causes: death by a thousand cuts, by familiarity,
assimilation, boredom, the search for something new to say, changes in the
assumptions it was built on, and so on. It is in the nature of these moments
of mutual, cultural co-production, in which an aesthetic work finds that its
significance gets reconfigured in a different era, that the moment will
eventually pass. As Jan Kott wrote in a 1981 reconsideration of his classical
critical work Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, “While Shakespeare is nearly
always in one sense or another our contemporary, there are times when, to
paraphrase George Orwell, he is more contemporary than at others.”142
The same of course is even more radically true of John Donne. In fact, it
seems clear that Donne is not now our contemporary in the same way that
he seemed to be in the period dominated by aesthetic Modernism, say,
from 1910 to 1960. We have been in a Postmodernist critical era since at
least 1985 (obviously, exact dating is impossible), and in terms of sheer
volume, it is clear that there has been no decline in interest in Donne.
Donne bibliographer John R. Roberts reported in 2004 that “more essays
and books are being written on Donne than at any period of the past,” and
he asserts that Donne has survived the changes in critical methodology of
recent times and refuses “to lie down quietly on ... Procrustean beds; and
so the stream of criticism surges on year after year.”143
Judging from more recent bibliographies, the high volume appears to
have been sustained since then. But what has changed is the status Donne
holds in the larger literary culture of the Postmodernist era. More than one
“Postmodernist Donne” has emerged. For some, Donne was highly over-
valued in the era of Modernism and needs reassessment. For others (such
as Roberts and others, including myself), he remains a vital force in the
changed culture of the twenty-first century.
Feminist criticism of Donne is a good example of the division, as
feminists have been divided in their evaluation of the poet’s treatment of
women. The issue is complicated by feminism’s multiple theoretical
variations and relations to other aspects of Postmodernism. Arising directly
out of political feminism in the 1970s, the critical movement has at times
embraced Postmodernist theory, at times resisted it, but always maintained
an overall interest in defining and defending women’s interests in literary
studies. It is thus related to those aspects of Postmodernist criticism
classically defined in an early essay by Craig Owens,144 but this Postmod-
ernist connection has not led to a critical consensus. Donne has been a
controversial figure for feminism, though he has had perhaps as many
feminist defenders as he has had feminist critics. The paradox is partially
explained by the co-existence in his oeuvre of cynical depictions of male
ego and objectified women side by side with some of the greatest expres-
sions of the experience of mutual and equal heterosexual love in all of
Western poetry.145 Feminist and proto-feminist critics (Margaret Fuller is a
prominent nineteenth-century example) tend to focus on these later
poems, while Donne’s feminist critics emphasize the former. Theresa
M. DiPasquale has written perhaps the fullest history of this dichotomy
in her “Donne, Women, and the Spectre of Misogyny” and sees it
continuing with no end in sight.146 I believe there is no alternative to
acknowledging that both sets of attitudes are represented in Donne’s
oeuvre. But we need to take pains not to essentialize the discourses within
the poetry as the unaltering doctrine of their author – as has happened all
too often in the history of responses to Donne.
Not only within the ranks of feminist critics, but across the field, it is
clear that over the last thirty years there has been a decidedly divided
opinion on Donne’s value as a poet. It seems that one of the most
prominent outcomes of the slow evolution of Postmodernist attitudes
toward Donne has been not only a sometimes strident series of arguments
for devaluation (which I will discuss shortly), but also a process of domesti-
cation by professionalization. Donne has become in our times a much
more conventional writer than he seemed to be in the Modernist era, in
large part because much of the critical discourse on him has become more
conventional. The relation of this development to Postmodernism may
seem remote (and certainly has an autonomous dimension), but Fredric
Jameson has pointed out a perhaps surprising aspect of Postmodernism
that throws light on this development: “the return to and the re-
establishment of all kinds of old things, rather than their wholesale
liquidation.”147 Examples of what Jameson is alluding to in Donne studies
include the dominance of textual criticism, a return to religious studies and
interests, and the popularity of versions of nontheoretical new materialism.
Certainly, each of these developments has made positive contributions to
contemporary Donne studies, but taken together they represent a clear
turn to the political right under the guise of professionalism. No one
would have predicted the current prominence of these tendencies thirty
years ago, when they were largely seen, as the saying went, as “part of the
problem, not of the solution.” None of these is on its surface related to the
upsurge in theory initiated by Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, cul-
tural materialism, and early new historicism usually associated with the
term “Postmodernism.” And yet, as we will see, there are beneath the
surface definite linkages. Whether they are in themselves sufficient prac-
tices for our appropriation of Donne in the twenty-first century, however,
is a different question, to which I will return below.
I discussed the current status of the Postmodernist revolution in criti-
cism in the conclusion of my 2009 Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, and
I believe much of that analysis is still relevant now.148 I should emphasize
that I am using the terms “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” here in very
general senses, designating broad aesthetic paradigms characteristic of
aesthetic periods that can last for many decades. They involve some shared
assumptions regarding aesthetic form, the functions of art, and the relation
of art to the surrounding cultural context – but individual works within
these larger movements can also, of course, display distinct qualities resist-
ant to easy generalizations. In the case of the shift from Modernist to
Postmodernist aesthetics, the most important general differences include
an abandonment by Postmodernism of assumptions of organic unity that
were still to be found in an important strand of Modernism, a tendency to
distrust established cultural and aesthetic privileges, and, as corollary of
this, a collapse of the distinction between “high” and “low” art.149
Postmodernism emerged both as a reaction against features of an
exhausted Modernism and as an aesthetic expression of a new phase of
capital and technological development after World War II.150 The term
“Postmodernism” itself began to appear in the 1960s in the art world, and
it entered academia via critical and cultural theory in the late 1970s and
1980s. Since then, however, the excitement has waned as the processes of
academic professionalization have worked to soften the critical edges of the
earliest work, and both the political and difficult theoretical dimensions of
the earlier works have receded from view. But for all this, no other
aesthetic movements have emerged to challenge Postmodernism’s con-
tinued existence as the hegemonic aesthetic paradigm, and I believe it is
fair to say that the art and academic worlds are still working within its
broad confines. The situation is something like the status of Modernism in
the 1950s and early 1960s – it is seen as aging, but there are no apparent
alternatives (except those retrospectively detected later). Such retrospective
classification could well happen at some point in the future since some of
the new critical work in Donne studies resists simple classification and will
require more time to come more clearly into focus.
However, in a recent article, Fredric Jameson took up precisely the
question of the continued relevance of the concepts of Postmodernism and
postmodernity in the world of 2015. Many critics, he acknowledges, have
claimed that Postmodernism is “over” and of no relevance to the present.
But he argues that however much aesthetic practices continue to evolve,
they are still broadly Postmodernist as he had described them in his earlier
work, with some tendencies accelerating. And he puts new emphasis on
and gives new details of his earlier thesis that the new art reflects the
economy’s entrance into a new phase of capitalism, based both on global-
ization and on a new level of financial abstraction epitomized by the
prevalence in the economy of the ubiquitous financial instruments called
derivatives. We are only at the beginning, he argues, of a long-term
postmodernity, which will continue to condition cultural production for
the indefinite future.151
Aesthetic Paradigms and Critical Paradigms

As I argued over two decades ago in my study of the evolving critical
fortunes of Shakespeare in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century,
changes in aesthetic assumptions and forms have observable and powerful
impacts on how critics interpret classic literary works. But critical para-
digms are also influenced by several other factors.152 In the twenty-first
century, it has long since been the case that the great preponderance of
literary critical work is produced in academia, and the norms and values of
academic institutions (inside and outside of universities and colleges) are,
to understate it, not entirely aesthetic. Academic criticism is a policed
discipline with high-stakes professional consequences (hiring, tenure, and
promotion) depending on its outcomes. Given that these decisions are
normally made by senior professors, there is a built-in conservative bias –
even though, as the era of 1980–2000 proved, the conservatism can be
overcome through the right combination of forces converging at the right
moment. Change can and does occur.
The particular change in literary critical practice I am referring to was
the dramatic and sweeping change-over to feminism, new historicism,
and cultural materialism beginning in the 1980s. And none of these
related critical paradigms was initially very kind to Donne. The then-
new emphasis on seeing Foucaultian power at work where an earlier
generation had seen the development of (in effect) modern subjectivity
applied all too centrally to the case of Donne’s love lyrics, with the
result that there was a certain ethos of debunking and deflation at work
in reinterpretations of the poetry. Goldberg’s James I and the Politics of
Literature (1983) is one influential example, with its blanket diagnosis
that “Donne’s self-constitution is absolutist ... He is fully made – or
unmade – in relation to the powers of society.”153 Arthur Marotti’s
classic John Donne: Coterie Poet is often rightly seen as sharing a similar
de-idealizing mission – although, unlike the work of several of its
contemporary new historicists, this rich book also recognizes that poetry
can resist as well as succumb to the demands of power and serve
utopian/critical as well as ideological interests. Marotti, for example,
states at one point:
Just as Donne, in his epistolary verse and prose, used a relationship of
friendship and of intellectual and spiritual seriousness as a refuge from the
corrupt social system, so in his love lyrics he treated mutuality of affection
as the space within which he could find an analogous private world of value
and satisfaction apart from the public world of selfish competition, but he
found the one world constantly intruding upon the other.154
Perhaps because there is such ample material available on the life of the
historical Donne (as opposed to the case of Shakespeare), and because
Donne’s chosen genres of lyrics, sermons, and letters readily lend them-
selves to interpretation as direct expressions of a scarcely mediated inner
life, it was easier than in the case of Shakespeare to create a sense of a
particular personality who is the authorial subject of the writings that have
come down to us as part of the literary canon. In any case, many of the
critical works on Donne’s oeuvre from those years simply bracketed the
widespread idea of the “death of the author” for the case of Donne and
targeted the man and the works as if they were one and as if they were
unproblematically transparent to readers from a very different time and
culture.
Typically in the history of criticism, this has meant the (usually uncon-
scious) projection of the critics’ own values and practices onto the far from
transparently available object of criticism. This is, in fact, the salient point
at the center of Richard Strier’s chapter on Donne in his 1995 Resistant
Structures, “Impossible Radicalism I: Donne and Freedom of Con-
science.”155 Strier shows how conservative assumptions that poets and
artists of the Renaissance were bound in by the conventional thinking of
their day prevent their sometimes radical ideas from being appreciated by
professional readers today. And he believes Donne is an extremely salient
example of this kind of reductive and domesticating historicizing treat-
ment. Evoking the late work on Donne of William Empson, Strier makes a
very strong case for seeing (the young) Donne “as a bold and radical
freethinker, a genuinely independent intellectual.”156 But Strier seemed
to be in a minority in that era of often negative assessments of Donne as a
hopeless conservative and male chauvinist. Some critics not only called the
Modernist Donne in question but also began to question Donne’s status as
a major, revered poet entirely.
A case in point was John Carey’s 1981 revisionist biography of Donne,
which in many ways reconfigured him as a 1980s yuppie – ambitious,
unprincipled, self-centered, canny.157 This Reagan-era Donne of ambition
also appears with different nuances in works of that era by Arthur Marotti,
Jonathan Goldberg, and Debora Shuger.158
Even more frankly an emotional attack on the man and his poetry is
Stanley Fish’s 1990 essay “Masculine Persuasive Force.” Fish states baldly
that “Donne is sick and his poetry is sick,” though he does note that this
makes for interesting reading and perhaps a diagnosis of our own cultural
situation.159 Oddly for an essentially deconstructive essay, Fish leaves his
subject’s identity very much at the center of his work – though he
subsequently notes that the suspicion that the stability of such an identity
is precarious comes into view from time to time.160 But Fish’s is a singular
voice within seventeenth-century literary studies, and it is perhaps danger-
ous to try to link him too closely to other critical developments.
To be sure, this slate of books debunking or critical of Donne did not
constitute the only approach to Donne’s work in the period. More positive
appropriations of his work were manifested in any number of ways, in his
continued presence in literature classes, in echoes of his work in some of
the lyric poetry of our times, and in the new attention to the sermons and
lyrics beyond The Songs and Sonets now very evident in Donne studies. As
always, cultural development is complex and contradictory. But that
should not deter us from trying to define a broad picture of changing
approaches to Donne.
Some Current Work on Donne

Contemporary Donne studies, as I noted above, has evolved in ways
impossible to envision in the heyday of the new historicism, with a marked
development of textual studies, religion-centered critical inquiries, and
other new materialist or nonpresentist studies of lost Renaissance know-
ledge – as well as some works that indeed could be called “presentist” in a
broad sense. In her Presidential Address to the John Donne Society annual
meeting in 2016, “‘Some New Pleasures’? Donne’s Lyrics and Recent
Critical Approaches,” Heather Dubrow provides an excellent overview of
some of the newer critical developments in the field. She identifies three
developing critical approaches to Donne interpretation that she sees as
opening up new ground: “spatial theory,” based on the theoretical work of
Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre but, as exemplified here, opening
into new approaches to close readings of the lyric; several related new
formalisms; and, connected to these, “revisionist close reading” that builds
on the field’s recent fascination with power and materiality.161 The atten-
tion to close reading and form evident here is, of course, related specifically
to issues of interpreting lyric poetry appropriate to a study of Donne, and
they reflect very recent developments in the field. Dubrow emphasizes her
preference for “both/and” rather than “either/or” approaches to critical
method and sees these methods as continuing older, ultimately New
Critical close readings – but transformed by appropriating ideas of recent
and current critical theory. In particular, they are all interested in
attempting “to dovetail formalist and materialist approaches” in different
ways – just as Benjamin, in his theory of allegory, attempted in his own
way. In arguing for these renewed forms of close reading, Dubrow argues:
Close attention to texts does not necessarily involve all the approaches and
values associated with it in its New Critical avatars – or rather in parodic
versions of them. We need not privilege paradox and irony above all else;
we need not focus on the individual, isolated text, as I will suggest in a
moment in relation to paratexts; we need not subscribe to the conservative
political positions of certain New Critics; we need not assume that tensions
are part of a well wrought urn, a harmonious whole.162
In short, these new approaches share in the broadly Postmodernist aes-
thetics that continue in our time even as different critical approaches
evolve and get established in the continuing task of interpreting the works
of the past in our present.
Another example of work attempting to interpret Donne in a Postmod-
ernist environment can be found in the recent critical literature tracing the
use of Donne’s poetry in contemporary (as well as in earlier Modernist)
poetry. Such attempts go back as far as the 1930s, but they have resurged
recently, showing quite directly how great works of the past get reconsti-
tuted and refunctioned in new aesthetic paradigms as their attendant
literary eras evolve. In this work we can directly trace how Donne was
appropriated for Modernism by such poets as John Crowe Ransom,
Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and (of course) T. S. Eliot – and for
Postmodernism by Anthony Hecht, Allen Ginsburg, Paul Muldoon,
Seamus Heaney, and several others.163 Judith Herz, in two related articles,
wrote a particularly detailed survey of twentieth-century and twenty-first-
century poets whose work shows concrete signs of incorporation of
Donne’s poetic techniques, visions, and phrases in poets as diverse as
Rupert Brooke, Hart Crane, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Muldoon, Warren
Zevon, Mark Jarman, and others.164 And Kimberly Johnson’s 2014 Made
Flesh, to which I will return below, advocates the use of reading techniques
and concepts developed in reading Modernist and Postmodernist texts to
interpret seventeenth-century poetry.165
Similarly, as briefly suggested above, even the apparently traditional and
professional activities of textual editing embodied in the volumes of the
Donne Variorum Project and the new Oxford edition of Donne’s Sermons
show the influence of Postmodernist theory.166 The connections between
poststructuralist literary theory and the new textual studies had been made
in the 1990s by several critics, such as Leah Marcus, who noted how
critiques of traditional ideas of a transcendent author and the unmediated
presence of the author in the texts we consume have changed the assump-
tions editors make in producing new editions.167 Stephen Greenblatt raised
similar points in the section of his introduction to The Norton Shakespeare,
“The Dream of the Master Text.”168 Similarly, Arthur Marotti, turning his
attention to the manuscript rather than the printed versions of classic
Renaissance texts, shows how textual issues form part of the study of
“the institution of literature itself and the status of authors, texts, and
readers within it.”169
A similar observation of the connection of the new textual studies to
larger cultural developments was made by Eric Rasmussen in a round-up
article on work in Shakespearean textual studies in 2005. He notes
that recent editors and bibliographers “see uncertainty in matters where
orthodoxy had formerly prevailed. Thus ... scholars once assumed that in
instances of two-text plays, such as Hamlet, the quarto was probably based
on a ‘foul paper’ manuscript and the Folio on a playhouse manuscript
(or vice versa).” But today’s editors are much less certain that such
assumptions should be made since they are highly conjectural.170
Such “uncertainty ... where orthodoxy had formally prevailed” is clearly
a mark of the Donne Variorum Project, with its refusal to sanction a
master text for the great majority of Donne poems and its frank acknow-
ledgment that “The almost total absence of holograph materials or of
authorially approved printings renders impossible any attempt to locate
textual authority in the author’s intentions, as that concept is generally
applied in scholarly editing.”171 As the presumed ultimate source of the
“reading texts,” Donne as author is reasserted in these editions at one level,
to be sure. But he is no longer assumed to be the secure authority behind
these published texts, and in that sense, the author is dead in the Vari-
orum – for good, empirical reasons – but dead nevertheless. Similarly, in
our multicultural age, the series attempts to greatly broaden the scope of
the criticism summarized not only by further search in English-language
sources, but also including criticism written in nine foreign languages.
The editors do characterize their work as “conservative,” but the context
makes clear that the word is used to emphasize an attempt to incorporate
rather than overthrow previous critical and textual work, while acknow-
ledging the situated nature of all critical interpretation as “inevitably
conditioned by cultural and personal assumptions about what poetry is
(or should be), about how it functions in the world, and about the nature
of criticism itself.”172 In short, for all its laborious traditional scholarship,
the Variorum Donne is definitely a part of a Postmodernist era.
The return to religion in Donne studies is similarly traditional in one
sense but part of the evolution of Postmodernism in another.173 It clearly
reflects the change in mentality toward religion accelerated by the events of
September 11, 2001, with their brutal witness to the continuing power of
religious belief in the world of late capitalism. And it follows in the wake
of Jacques Derrida’s “religious turn,” a reference to a series of essays written
in the period before his death under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas in
which Derrida turns to topics associated with the monotheistic religious
tradition.174 Contemporary Postmodernist culture has very much made
religion a central issue in its theorizing today – as has Donne studies in its
attempts to understand its subject. The relation of all this to an evolving
Postmodernist cultural moment is evident here as elsewhere in the field,
even though the connection is often overlaid with a whole variety of
differing ideas and approaches as we move ahead in trying to find new
alternatives to the methods that have dominated the field for the last thirty
years: the new historicism, cultural materialism, and their offshoots still
playing a role today.175
Moving on in Donne Studies

There are clearly passionate students and appreciators of Donne’s work
today (I count myself among them), and we can perhaps detect something
of a renewal of interest as the twenty-first century advances through its
second decade. As I’ve just argued, Donne studies have been markedly
influenced by several aspects of contemporary Postmodernist culture, in
several different critical works, even if they are not yet affected by the new
thinking on the baroque.176 But by way of an explanation of the values and
methods of the work on Donne’s poetry that follows, I want to identify
relatively recent works within Donne studies that, unlike most other recent
scholarly productions, take Postmodernist theory as an important issue for
the study of Donne in our times – and in that way are compatible with the
critical theory of Walter Benjamin I will be working with in what follows.
Donne could be as much an icon of the twenty-first century as the
Modernist Donne was of the twentieth. That singular cultural moment
was not, as so many historical critics have implicitly argued, some aberra-
tion now thankfully overcome as we are at last face to face with the “real”
Donne. Rather, it is a unique cultural event to be celebrated and studied as
such. Donne may never again have the cultural impact he had in the 1920s,
but he can still be renewed and celebrated in the terms of our own era, like
other major literary figures. Such approaches are, in our time of post-
theory and deradicalized historicism, relatively scarce. But they are crucial
for the further development of Donne’s afterlife. For that reason among
others, I will attempt to follow one of Walter Benjamin’s most salient
pieces of advice: “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from
the conformism that is working to overpower it.”177
There are four monographs from the Postmodernist era that pursue this
approach, I believe: Thomas Docherty’s 1986 John Donne, Undone; Ronald
Corthell’s 1997 book-length study of Donne and his complex relation to
both Renaissance and contemporary ideology, Ideology and Desire in
Renaissance Poetry; Ben Saunders’s 2006 Desiring Donne – preeminently
its passionately written introduction; and Johnson’s 2014 Made Flesh.
There are several others that are connected to this movement in different
ways, and I will reference some of them in what follows.178 I have already
mentioned Richard Strier’s portrait of Donne as a radical poet in his
1995 Resistant Structures – though in other ways Strier rejects some
central critical moves associated with Postmodernism, unlike the four
I discuss here.
Docherty’s is the pioneering work. His book represents the moment
when British cultural materialism and American new historicism began to
develop as major movements in early modern studies. The book’s back
cover in the University Paperbacks edition advertises contemporary crit-
ical efforts in a similar vein by Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Goldberg, and
Terence Hawkes. Following up on an idea that had been put forward
earlier by a number of Modernist-era critics like Marjorie Hope Nicolson,
Docherty situates Donne at the moment when, he argues, the Coperni-
can revolution in cosmology was beginning to be felt across a broad
spectrum of thought, with the result that there is a general decentering
of traditional thinking of all sorts. Donne’s poems are very much expres-
sions of this moment. And these decentered texts are then seen as
opening up to the processes of Derridean deconstruction. The result is
a complex analysis of the world of The Songs and Sonets and the other
lyrics as much more radical and skeptical in their concepts than had
hitherto been understood, at least in so-called mainstream criticism.
He also demonstrates the centrality in many of Donne’s poems of a male
anxiety about women, a profound unease with the contradictions
involved in men trying at once both to control and to affirm the
subjectivity of erotic partners.179
The second half of the work, however, attempts to show how the
skeptical Donne eventually gives way to the theological Donne of his later
life and to me is a less exhilarating.180 Here I want to emphasize the first
part of the work as displaying qualities of Donne I believe make him most
relevant to our time and culture. Docherty’s work remains a source of
insights and analysis that very much establishes the arrival of an unequivo-
cally Postmodernist Donne and identifies and critiques key assumptions of
earlier Modernist critics.
Ronald Corthell’s Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry (1997)
appeared a full decade after Docherty’s work, and it reflected the develop-
ment and widespread influence of the new historicism and cultural materi-
alism in the meantime. Corthell is perhaps more of an American cultural
materialist than he is a new historicist since he is acutely interested in
theoretical issues associated with post-Althusserian Marxism in a way one
seldom sees, say, in Louis Montrose or Stephen Greenblatt – or, for that
matter, in Arthur Marotti’s pioneering and only occasionally theoretical
John Donne: Coterie Poet. Corthell does, however, profit from Marotti’s
book and cites it often, and he mentions influence by Thomas Docherty as
well. What I take as most valuable in his work is his creative use of a post-
Althusserian theory that avoids Althusser’s monolithic construction of
subjectivity by power. Rather, Corthell adopts Paul Smith’s much more
supple view that the process of interpellating a subject into social being
“also produces contradiction and negativity.”181 The result is the best
application of cultural materialism/new historicism to Donne’s work that
I know of, one that locates Donne in a world of power and ideology but
sees the poetry as involving a complex subjectivity (connected, of course,
to the external world) as well.
Another decade passed before the appearance of the next book-length
study of Donne embodying Postmodernist theory and approaching its
object of study as a positive cultural force. Ben Saunders’s Desiring Donne
(2006) was a heartening development within a field some of whose
members seemed at times unsure whether its object really deserved its
continued attention.182 Saunders was very conscious of this development.
He wrote, “With the decline of the New Criticism, the weight of critical
opinion has come down against Donne yet once more, more firmly than at
any time since the eighteenth century.”183 Saunders goes on to argue that
rather than a history of boom and bust in the appreciation of Donne, we
should discern, from Ben Jonson to the present, critical ambivalence – “a
classic ‘love-hate relationship.’”184 This perhaps overstates the continuity
and puts aside the oscillations in opinion Saunders had already alluded to.
But certainly a “love-hate” relation to Donne is not hard to imagine, and
Saunders’s exploration of such an attitude is quite interesting and illumin-
ating. The chapters that follow the introduction, perhaps, are less original,
more influenced by the kind of new materialism I mentioned above, but
on the whole the book’s manifesto for “interpretive desire” remains a
challenge to Donne studies even today.
Finally, Kimberly Johnson’s 2014 Made Flesh can serve as an example of
a theory-informed and presentist/historicist approach to Donne more
current in its concerns and sensitivities than the other three books
I discuss. Johnson’s book – and I should clarify that it treats not only
Donne but Herbert, Edward Taylor, and Crashaw as well – is not only a
historicist investigation of how Reformation and Counter-Reformation
ideas of the Eucharist inform the practice of several seventeenth-century
English poets, but it is also, explicitly, a discussion of poetic language based
on the work of a number of broadly Postmodernist theorists, among them
Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Charles Bernstein, Charles Altieri, and
Susan Stewart. Johnson is a poet herself whose work, as others have noted,
shows an adaptation of Donne’s poetic techniques to decidedly contem-
porary and broadly Postmodernist poetry.
Johnson notes that the debate on the Eucharist was in many ways one
about epistemological-aesthetic issues of representation, particularly the
question of modes of representation of the divine – whether as literal
“presence” (as in the Tridentine Catholic position) or as symbolic memor-
ialization (the view of Calvin and his followers). And there were of course
gradations in between these two extremes. But these distinctions allow
Johnson to approach Donne’s (and other poets’) own distinctive tropes
with new analytic tools that are in part historical, but also all based on an
assumption that none of the original participants in the theological con-
troversies would have allowed, that the most fruitful applications of the
discussion are aesthetic, not theological.185
At times, her formulations come close to some of Benjamin’s views on
the relation of signified and signifier in allegory. She emphasizes, in
language that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s discussion of the importance
of the idea of hieroglyphics to seventeenth-century German writers,186
what she calls (borrowing the term from Charles Bernstein) the “antiab-
sorptive” properties of poetic language, which foreground the poem’s
“non-denotative qualities.” Such language “must be negotiated not merely
as a set of referential signs but as an object.”187 Benjamin would largely
agree, especially for the case of the seventeenth century, though he would
hotly contest Johnson’s immediately following statement that such a
strategy “confers presence rather than implying absence.” He would insist
that the poetry of the seventeenth-century is marked instead by a preva-
lence of the allegorical mode, in which there is always a marked dissonance
between poetic signified and signifier in which absence plays a distinctive
part. “For allegory is both: convention and expression; and both are
inherently contradictory,” he wrote.188
One need not agree with Johnson’s central claim that “Lyric poetry in
early modern England begins to exhibit a suite of characteristics that can
only be understood as a direct response to Reformation controversies over
the Eucharist”189 to welcome this erudite and lucid discussion of some of the
qualities of poetic language in Donne’s era and immediate aftermath. But
her argument that such poetry is best read in the light of Postmodernist
poetics is an important one and a sign of a growing countertrend in the field.
Benjamin, Baroque Allegory, and the Postmodernist Donne

Today, the use of theory in the reading of Donne epitomized by these four
critics has become less common than it once was. I think it is time to
further develop the tradition, building on what came before but introdu-
cing something new into the process. I believe the literary and cultural
theory painstakingly built up by Walter Benjamin can serve this purpose –
and contribute as well to the new interest in the baroque I have identified
above. In particular, Benjamin’s theory of the baroque allegory – created,
as I pointed out, specifically for the baroque era – is germane to Donne. It
is a historicizing theory, but at a much less minute level than new
materialism; and like the aesthetics of Benjamin’s friend and collaborator
Theodor Adorno, it takes aesthetic form seriously and gives it its own
autonomy even while relating it to its historical context. And it is resolutely
Postmodernist in its approach to unity so that it fits our own aesthetic
moment even though it originated in the age of high Modernism.
While the specifics of the application of Benjamin’s theory to Donne’s
poetry will be worked out below, a brief overview of some of its most
salient features will help clarify my purposes here.
As noted above, in writing The Origin of German Tragic Drama in the
1920s, Benjamin was not yet an explicit Marxist. At this point in his
intellectual development he was, very broadly speaking, a post-Kantian
working under the influence of two brilliant early twentieth-century
Hegelian cultural theorists, Benedetto Croce and Georg Lukács – as well
as, as we saw, taking specific borrowings from Henri Bergson and Friedrich
Nietzsche. Like most of the era’s German cultural theorists, he emphasized
large-scale intellectual periods developing over time and expressing them-
selves as the Zeitgeist of literary-historical-philosophical works.
In addressing the baroque drama of seventeenth-century Germany, he
asserted that it was not really a form of tragedy, as had generally been
thought. He argued that the form of ancient Greek tragedy had disap-
peared from the world, just as that of Greek heroic epic, and he thought
that tragedy had developed into an essentially new form that he called,
using a traditional German term that he now differentiated from its
German cognate Tragödie, the Trauerspiel (“mourning-play”), marked by
a baroque aesthetics of the allegory – a term he developed into unique
meanings to be explored below. The new baroque aesthetic forms
embodied the spirit of the new intellectual world opened up by the
Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the rise
of science. Later, in his work on Baudelaire, Benjamin would add that
the development of the commodity form in mercantile capitalism should
be added to this briefly sketched list of cultural influences.
In this brave new world, Benjamin argued, intrinsic meaning was no
longer to be found in the environment but became the object of quests.
The world and its objects were emptied of intrinsic value, and this created
the conditions for the emergence of the modern allegory. Thus the allegory
of early modernity arises in the new worldview. No longer organically
unified, nature is open to allegoricization in fragments. That is to say, the
world loses any intrinsic meaning and becomes a set of hieroglyphs open to
allegorical interpretation, a kind of script, he says, to be read as needed.
The allegorist gives meaning like “a stern sultan in the harem of objects” or
like a sadist who “humiliates his object and then – or thereby – satisfies it.
And that is what the allegorist does in this age drunk with acts of cruelty
both lived and imagined.”190 As a result, one of the great formal differences
between Greek and early modern drama, Benjamin argued, was in the type
of aesthetic unity each favored, with Greek art generally utilizing the
unifying symbol, the Trauerspiel the fragmenting allegory. As Rainer
Rochlitz wrote in his study of Benjamin’s aesthetics, “Allegory is not only
the formal principle of a certain kind of art – from this perspective, it is
opposed to the ‘symbol’ or to an art defined as ‘symbolic’ – but also, more
than a rhetorical or even poetic concept, it is an aesthetic concept that
alludes to the coherence of a vision of the world.”191
Benjamin, ever the definer of dialectical opposites, notes as well that
while the method of the allegory presupposes a meaningless world of
empty objects, it also empowers its images, “raises them to a higher plane,”
by giving them aesthetic meanings. The allegorical world is thus
“both elevated and devalued.”192 And it is like a kind of holy scripture that
aspires to become “one single and inalterable complex” of meaning.193
Gilles Deleuze gives an especially illuminating description of Benjamin’s
concept of the baroque allegory in The Fold, discussed briefly above:
Walter Benjamin made a decisive step forward in our understanding of the
Baroque when he showed that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an
abstract personification, but a power of figuration entirely different from
that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary,
nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history
according to the order of time. It produces a history from nature and
transforms history into nature in a world that no longer has its center.194
Deleuze also agrees with Benjamin that the baroque is an early unfolding
of modernity – an idea Benjamin ratifies in his dictum, “Modernity has,
for its armature, the allegorical mode of vision.” 195 Leibniz, according to
Deleuze, appears at the moment of the crisis of rationality that in effect
inaugurates modernity.196
And these qualities, while they are defined by Benjamin almost solely as
an aspect of drama, can be seen as well in the “baroque” lyric poetry of
John Donne. What I want to argue in this book is that much of John
Donne’s poetry, and in particular the two Anniversary poems and The
Songs and Sonets, are examples in the lyric mode of the kind of allegory
Benjamin defined for early modern drama. There is a convergence both in
form and in vision.
This sharing is most explicit in the two great Anniversary poems, and I will
therefore begin the concrete discussion of poetic texts with them in Chapter 2.
But in the Songs and Sonets as well, there is a strong strain of melancholy – but
also an even stronger manifestation of the baroque allegory’s contradictory
impulse toward redemption, as I will discuss in Chapter 3. In these works, we
will see, Donne emerges as an allegorist of the utopian, mixing melancholy
and exaltation in a lyric mode that is more akin to the tragicomic structures of
Shakespeare’s late plays than to his tragedies. The allegory, Benjamin asserts,
discloses a world in decay, but it shows how the elements of decay can be
reborn as new art in a new and different era:
The exuberant subjection of antique elements in a structure, which, with-
out uniting them in a single whole, would, in destruction, still be superior
to the harmonies of antiquity, is the purpose of the technique [of allegory]
which applies itself separately, and ostentatiously, to realia, rhetorical figures
and rules.197
It is in this aspect of Benjamin’s “allegory” that the connection to Donne’s lyric

poetry is most relevant – although, as we will see, there are other links as well.
In Chapter 4, I focus on what literary history has called “the Metaphys-
ical conceit,” with a view toward showing how Benjamin’s terms “baroque
image” and “baroque allegory” can help us think about these tropes in new
ways. In addition, Donne’s works share an immersion in the baroque
melancholy that Benjamin emphasized was implicit in the allegorical
emptying-out of the meaning of things in the rise of modernity.
The last full chapter takes up the now neglected issue of a baroque
worldview underlying the era’s poetic productions, and here again,
I believe Benjamin’s discussion of the allegory as well as his theory of
language (both of which I connect to Baltasar Gracián’s seventeenth-
century theory of baroque wit) can illuminate this issue as well.
A Benjaminian approach to Donne begins forthrightly in a suspension
of the quest for unity that was so essential in the formative New Critical
approaches to Donne that still live a kind of subterranean life in the field.
While occasionally referencing other areas of Donne’s oeuvre, I have
decided to concentrate on Donne’s poetic language in The Songs and Sonets
and his two Anniversary poems – works that I believe display most clearly
the parallels with Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory that form the
main subject of this work – and displaying the kind of critical history that
best illuminates that movement from Modernist to Postmodernist Donne
that is an issue as well. It will be necessary to revisit issues of Donne’s
historical context in this effort, but in the knowledge that our citations of
history bear within themselves the imprint of our own moment of perceiv-
ing. I hope many readers will make the connections of Benjamin’s theories
with other segments of Donne’s creative productions as well.
I have spent my professional career as a Shakespearean, and the great
majority of my professional publications have been in Shakespeare studies.
But my PhD was in a comparative literature program, and my dissertation
was a comparatist study of John Donne’s lyrics and those of the three
major French Symbolist poets, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, in a
reconsideration of T. S. Eliot’s famous theses linking these two poetic
schools as both creating a poetry of unified sensibility.198 And I have
maintained an interest in Donne’s poetry my whole career, rereading
and teaching his poetry in a number of different courses over the years.
The idea of reconnecting with it in a more scholarly and theoretical
context than that of the classroom was enormously appealing, and
I decided it was worth the risk to step outside my usual specialization
and try to reconnect to the world of Donne studies after all these years. Of
course, I was aware that I would of necessity come to this effort as
something of an outsider, and I apologize in advance for the shortcomings
this status may have produced in this effort. My hope is that that status will
also, however, be an advantage as well as a disadvantage, allowing me to
bring new perspectives to bear on Donne’s poetry.
Notes
1 The heart of this effort is Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed.
Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 1996–2003).
2 For examples from a very large literature, see the discussion of Benjamin’s term
“montage” (related to his theory of allegory) in Modernist and Postmodernist
art in Gregory Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in Hal Foster, ed., The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 83–110.
3 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: New Left Books, 1977); originally published as Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1928). The book was written in the period
1924–25.
4 See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 133–54, for an earlier discussion of Benjamin’s theories
of Trauerspiel and allegory and their relevance to Shakespeare, a discussion from
which I draw in what follows. Other applications of Benjamin’s theory of the
allegory to early modern literature include Susan Zimmerman, The Early
Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005), especially 13–18; Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard,
After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1992), 34–59; Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–14; Catherine Gimelli Martin, The
Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Jonathan Gil Harris and
Natasha Korda, “Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Prop-
erties,” in Harris and Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English
Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12–13. More recently,
see Margheri Pascucci, Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare: “Thou art the
Thing Itself” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 10–21.
5 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999).
6 Cf. Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart
Epithalamium, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 269.
7 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken,
1969), 217–51. The essay has been retranslated and given a modified title in the
Harvard University Press Selected Writings series; see “The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:
251–83.
8 Benjamin, Origin, 182.
9 I made this point in Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 153.
10 This work, then, should be seen as connected with the larger development of
the ideas of critical presentism I have pursued over several works in the last
thirty years or more. See especially the following two critical anthologies:
Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares (London:
Routledge, 2007), and Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady, eds., Shakespeare
and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the Twenty-first Century
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
11 Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014). I have also found Esther Leslie, Walter
Benjamin (Critical Lives) (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), a valuable though
much briefer account because it contains perspectives and facts not given by
Eiland and Jennings on both the life and the works.
12 Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 33.
13 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY:
Dover, 1998) and Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and
W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991).
14 Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 58–59.
15 Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 289.
16 Karl Marx, Letter to Ruge, Sept. 1843; quoted in Maynard Solomon, ed.,
Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (New York: Vintage, 1974),
462–63.
17 See especially Hugh Grady, “Shakespeare Studies 2005: A Situated Overview,”
Shakespeare: A Journal 1.1 (2005): 102–20.
18 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility: Third Version,” in Selected Writings, 4: 251–83.
19 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings, 4: 354n77.
20 Ferris, “Introduction: Aura, Resistance and the Event of History,” in David S.
Ferris, ed., Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996), 20–23.
21 Samuel Weber, “Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of
Walter Benjamin,” in Ferris, ed., Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, 49.
22 Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 225–39.
24 Cf. George Steiner, Introduction to Benjamin, Origin, 21–22: “Benjamin’s
hermeneutic of and by citation has its contemporary flavour: it is very
obviously akin to the collage and montage-aesthetic in the poetry of Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot, and in the prose of Joyce – all of whom are producing
major works at exactly the same date as Benjamin’s Ursprung.”
25 Benjamin, Origin, 54–56.
26 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolute N (“On the Theory of Knowledge,
Theory of Progress”), N3, 1, 462–63.
27 See especially two essays on the issues raised in this dense quote in Ferris, ed.,
Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions: David S. Ferris, “Introduction: Aura,
Resistance, and the Event of History,” 1–26, and Samuel Weber, “Mass
Mediauras; or, Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,”
27–49. Benjamin had used the phrase “dialectics at a standstill” in reference to
Baudelaire’s poetry and his nineteenth-century milieu in “Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century,” in Selected Writings, 3: 40.
28 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Jennings, Eiland,
and Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, 4: 389–400; 395.
29 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390–91.
30 Richard Halpern, “The Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoeisis and
History in in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.1 (1993):
185–215; 191–92, among others, notes the connection between the rise of
Donne and the rise of Modernism; and somewhere in the background of
my thinking is undoubtedly the parallels with the case of Shakespeare
I defined in Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a
Material World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
31 Ernest W. Sullivan II, The Influence of John Donne: His Uncollected Seventeenth-
Century Printed Verse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 21. See
also David Scott Kastan, “The Body of the Text,” ELH 81.2 (Summer 2014):
443–67, for an excellent analytic description of the indeterminate agencies
involved in the manuscript copying and printing of Donne’s poetry.
32 Sullivan, The Influence of John Donne, 3–13.
33 John Dryden, “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire,”
(1693), in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1958), 2: 604.
34 A. J. Smith, Introduction, John Donne: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge, 1975), affirms the general trend but exempts Dryden himself from
it: “Dryden was far from dismissing Donne at any time, having opened his
poetic career as Donne’s disciple and continued to imitate him. He speaks of
Donne’s surpassing talent and repeatedly singles him out for wit from all other
English poets ... But in the course of subsequent criticism the good qualities
sank out of sight or were distorted and the features Dryden reprobates were
taken for the whole of Donne” (13).
35 Sullivan, The Influence of John Donne, 1–51.
36 Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Abraham Cowley,” excerpted in Samuel John-
son, Lives of the English Poets: Selections (New York: Gateway, 1955), 1.
37 Dayton Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
38 Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century, 114, 119–20.
39 Quotes here, however, are taken from T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,”
in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 241–50.
40 Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century, 195.
41 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolute N (“On the Theory of Knowledge,
Theory of Progress”), N3, 1, 462–63.
42 Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and
Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947); see
especially the final chapter, pp. 382–410, for her notorious argument that there
is no real difference between the kind of metaphors of discordia concors
(“metaphysical conceits”) that Donne habitually employs and the traditional
ones of much sixteenth-century poetry.
43 Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” 249.
44 Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” 248.
45 T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (New
York: Harcourt, 1993), 43–44.
46 T. S. Eliot, “Donne in Our Time,” in Theodore Spencer, ed., A Garland for
John Donne: 1631–1931 (1931; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958),
3–19; 5.
47 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings 4: 390.
48 Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” In For Marx, trans.
Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1982), 87–128; 113.
49 Virginia Woolf, “Donne after Three Centuries,” in The Second Common
Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 20–37.
50 See Charlotte H. Beck, The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2001), for a detailed account of the various
strands that went into the makeup of the American New Criticism associated
especially with John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and
Cleanth Brooks. There were of course differences among these four, and Beck
argues that Brooks’s version eventually became the most influential and was
essentially a synthesis of Richards’s critical techniques and T. S. Eliot’s literary
theory.
52 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso,
1998), 5–6.
53 See especially Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 324–31, among other passages in
Convolute J on Baudelaire; and his “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth
Century: Expose of 1935,” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 10–11, and “Paris,
the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Expose of 1939,” in Benjamin, The
Arcades Project, 21.
55 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New
York: Harbrace, 1947; reprint, New York: Harvest, n.d.), 18.
56 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; revised and reprinted, New
York: New Directions, n.d.), v.
57 Chanita Goodblatt, “Reconsidering ‘Holy Sonnet 7’: From I. A. Richards to
the Modern Student,” paper presented at the Reconsidering Donne Confer-
ence, Lincoln College, Oxford University, Oxford, Mar. 24, 2015.
58 See I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929; 3rd
ed., New York: Harcourt, 1935).
59 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in de Man, Blindness and
Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., revised
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228; and de Man,
“Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in de Man,
The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
73–105. See Andrea Mirabilo, “Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to
Benjamin in Paul de Man,” German Studies Review 35.2 (2013): 319–33, for a
revealing analysis of de Man’s underacknowledged debts to Benjamin’s theory
of allegory and an astute discussion of important differences between the two.
And see Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (London: Routledge, 2010), 109–51, for
useful discussions of both Benjamin and de Man on allegory.
60 Apparently the first work to apply the idea of a baroque style and period to
literary studies was Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersu-
chung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (Munich: F.
Bruckmann, 1888). An influential development of the relatively brief section
in Wölfflin making that argument was the article by Fritz Strich, “Der lyrische
stil des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts,” in Abhandlungen zur deutschen Literatur-
geschicte: Franze Muncker zum 60. Geburstag, eds. Eduard Berend et al.
(Munich: Beck, 1916), 21–53. Both are cited several times by Benjamin.
61 On all this, see the meticulously researched study of Benjamin’s sources, Jane
O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 23–76.
62 Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 72–76.
63 Benjamin, Origin, 54–55; and see Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 73, 134.
64 Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 7.
65 Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock.
66 The quotations are from the summary of Wölfflin’s ideas in Michael Ann
Holly, “Wölfflin and the Imagining of the Baroque,” in Visual Culture: Images
and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson et al. (Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 1994), 347–64; 347.
67 For a broad survey of the early spread of the idea of the literary baroque, see
René Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5.2 (Dec. 1946): 77–109. I cite from the journal
version here and below. It is available reprinted in René Wellek, Concepts of
Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 69–114.
68 Mario Praz, Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne–Richard Cra-
shaw (Florence: La Voce, 1925).
69 Mario Praz, “Donne and the Poetry of His Time,” in Spencer, ed., A Garland
for John Donne, 51–72.
70 His connections were mostly to Great Britain rather than to the United States,
though he gave a lecture tour in America in 1951. He was named a Knight
Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1962.
71 Praz, “Donne and the Poetry of His Time,” 56.
72 Praz, “Donne and the Poetry of His Time,” 57.
73 Praz, “Donne and the Poetry of His Time,” 58–59.
76 Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other
Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to
T. S. Eliot (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), 204–63.
77 Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome: Editione
di Storia e Letteratura, 1964–74).
78 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Humphrey
Milford, 1933).
79 Mario Praz, “Baroque in England,” Modern Philology 61 (1964): 169–79; 173.
80 Praz, “Baroque in England,” 175.
81 Martin Bucco, René Wellek (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 22.
82 See, for example, René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 6: 293–99.
83 Bucco, Rene Wellek, 23.
84 Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” 79–80.
85 Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” 86.
86 Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” 97.
87 His two biggest achievements in bringing his critical ideas to American
English studies were (with co-author Austin Warren) Theory of Literature
(New York: Harcourt, 1942) and the multivolume A History of Modern
Criticism: 1750–1950, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955–92).
88 René Wellek, “Postscript 1962,” in Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen
G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 115–27; 121.
89 Frank J. Warnke, Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth
Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 5.
90 Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 5–12.
91 Robert T. Petersson, “Review of Versions of Baroque: European Literature in
the Seventeenth Century, by Frank J. Warnke,” Renaissance Quarterly 27.2
(1974): 264–67; 264.
92 Albert R. Cirillo, “Review of Crashaw and the Baroque by Marc.
F. Bertonasco and Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seven-
teenth Century by Frank J. Warnke,” Modern Philology 71.4 (1974):
430–34; 431.
93 Cirillo, “Review of Crashaw and the Baroque,” 430–31.
94 Alan M. Boase, “Review of Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the
Seventeenth Century by Frank J. Warnke,” Modern Language Review 71.1
(1976): 165–67.
95 Rosalie L. Colie, “‘Seventeenth-Century Manners’: Review of Earl Miner, ed.,
Seventeenth-Century Imagery: Essays on Uses of Figurative Language from
Donne to Farquhar and Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the
Seventeenth Century by Frank J. Warnke,” Yale Review 61: 591–99; 599.
96 See, for example, Harold B. Segel, The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Survey
(New York: Dutton, 1974); Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit: A Study of John
Donne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), which sees Donne as a lyric Mannerist; or
Aldo Sacagllione et al., eds., The Image of Baroque (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).
97 Elias L. Rivers, “‘Must One Be Metacritical?’: Review of Versions of Baroque:
European Literature in the Seventeenth Century by Frank J. Warnke,” Dia-
critics 2.3 (1972): 22–24.
98 John R. Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism,
4 vols., DigitalDonne: The Online Variorum, donnevariorum.tamu.edu,
Scholarly Tools and Resources. The first three volumes are taken from
scanned versions of the following printed editions: Roberts, John Donne:
An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967 (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1973); Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated
Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1968–1978 (Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 1982); Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated
Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979–1995 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press, 2004). The last volume is a purely electronic publication.
99 Terence Heywood, “Some Notes on English Baroque,” Horizon 2 (1942):
267–70.
100 The journal began as a project of the American Communist Party, but in the
later 1930s became an independent left-wing journal, publishing articles on
art, politics, and culture by many leading American and foreign intellectuals.
During the Cold War it came to largely support US foreign policy and
received funding from the CIA.
101 Wylie Sypher, “The Metaphysicals and the Baroque,” Partisan Review 11
(1944): 3–17.
102 Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and
Literature 1400–1700 (1955; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978).
103 Werner J. Milch, “Metaphysical Poetry and the German ‘Barocklyrik,”
Comparative Literature Studies (Cardiff) 23–24 (1946): 16–22.
104 Werner Milch, “Deutsche Barocklyrik und ‘Metaphysical Poetry,’” Trivium 5
(1947): 65–73.
105 Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1953).
106 E. B. O. Borgerhoff, “‘Mannerism’ and ‘Baroque’: A Simple Plea,” Compara-
tive Literature 5: 323–31.
107 Daniel B. Rowland, Mannerism – Style and Mood: An Anatomy of Four Works
in Three Art Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964).
108 Frank Kermode, ed., The Metaphysical Poets: Key Essays on Metaphysical Poetry
and the Major Metaphysical Poets (New York: Fawcett, 1969).
109 John Miroslav Hanak, “The Emergence of Baroque Mentality and Its Cul-
tural Impact on Western Europe after 1550,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 28.3 (1970): 315–26; Sandra R. Mangelsdorf, “Donne, Herbert, and
Vaughan: Some Baroque Features,” Northeast Modern Language Association
Newsletter 2: 14–23; George R. Levine, “Satiric Intent and Baroque Design in
Donne’s ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star,’” Die Neueren Sprachen 20: 384–87.
110 J. P. Hill and E. Caracciolo-Trejo, eds., Baroque Poetry (London: Dent, 1975),
and Harold B. Segel, The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Survey (New York:
Dutton, 1974)
111 Elaine L. Hoover, John Donne and Francisco de Quevedo: Poets of Love and
Death (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).
112 Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit: A Study of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon,
1974).
113 Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
114 Livio Dobrez, “Mannerism and Baroque in English Literature,” Miscellanea
Musicologica 11 (1980): 84–96; Gerd Rohmann, “New Aspects of Metaphysical
Poetry,” in Anglistentag, 1982, ed. Udo Fries and Jörg Hasler (Giessen:
Hoffmann, 1984), 197–220; Louis Martz, “English Religious Poetry, from
Renaissance to Baroque,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 11 (1985): 3–38;
J. W. Van Hook, “‘Concupiscence of Witt’: The Metaphysical Conceit in
Baroque Poetics,” Modern Philology 84 (1986): 24–38; Frank Warnke, John
Donne (Boston: Twayne, 1987); and Andrew Sanders, “Andrews and Donne,”
in The Short Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994),
192–200.
115 John M. Steadman, Redefining a Period Style: “Renaissance,” “Mannerist” and
“Baroque” in Literature (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1990).
116 Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th
ed., vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 2012).
117 “Allied Organization Sessions,” Program for the 132nd Annual Convention of
the Modern Language Association of America (Jan. 2017), PMLA 131.4
(Sept. 2016), 888–89.
118 Rolf Lessenich, “The ‘Metaphysicals’: English Baroque Literature in Con-
text,” Erfurt Electronic Studies in English 7 (1997): 1–14.
119 Peter DeSa Wiggins, Donne, Castiglione, and Poetry of Courtliness (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2000), 18–19, quoted in Roberts, John Donne:
An Annotated Bibliography, 1996–2008, 181.
120 Gilles Mathis, “‘Woman’s Constancy’ de Donne: Une approche stylistique,”
in La poésie métaphysique de John Donne, ed. Claudine Raynaud et al. (Tours:
Université François Rabelais, 2002), 47–73.
121 Angus Fletcher, “Donne’s Apocryphal Wit,” in Fletcher, Time, Space, and
Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 113–29.
122 Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Unmeete Contraryes: The Reformed Subject and
the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne’s Annivearies and Holy
Sonnets,” in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed. Mary Arshagouni
Papazian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 193–220; 196, quoted
in Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography, 1996–2008, 287.
123 Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and
Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013), 161–62.
124 Christopher N. Johnson, “Baroque,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012).
125 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002), 29.
126 For a summary argument of this position, see Lambert, The Return of the
Baroque, 139–49. It is most developed in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993), one of Lambert’s key sources, discussed briefly below.
127 Johnson, “Baroque.”
128 See especially Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty (1922; rev. ed. 1934), trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985).
129 Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” Representations
83 (2003): 67–96; 67.
130 For a bracing and skeptical reaction to the vogue of Schmitt, see Andreas
Höffele, “Hamlet in Blettenberg: Carl Schmitt’s Shakespeare,” Shakespeare
Survey 65 (2013): 378–97.
131 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller- Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
132 Victoria Khan, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern
Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. This work contains one
of the clearest delineations of the contemporary context for the development
of the discourse of political theology I know of.
133 See, for example, Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision”; Julia
Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005); Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds.,
Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012); Richard Halpern, “The King’s Two Buckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II,
and Fiscal Trauerspiel,” Representations 106.1 (2009): 67–76; Nichole E. Miller,
Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014); and Christopher Pye, The
Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2015). There are several others as well. Schmitt’s foray
into Shakespeare criticism has been published in an English version with
commentaries in Carl Schmitt’s “Hamlet or Hecuba,” a special issue of the
journal Telos 153 (2010), eds. David Pan and Julia Reinhard Lupton.
134 Philip Lorenz, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance
Drama (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 16. The baroque theater
alluded to in the quote is instantiated by chapters on Shakespeare’s King
Richard II and Measure for Measure, Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, and Lope de
Vega’s Fuenteovejuna.
135 Lorenz, Tears of Sovereignty, 14.
136 Greene, Five Words. For the discussion of the baroque, see pp. 160–72.
137 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge;
Book XX Encore 1972–73, trans. Bruce Fink, Book XX of The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1999), 75–77 and
95–117; a translation of Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XX, Encore 1972–73
(Paris: Seuil, 1975).
138 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 113.
139 See Nadir Z. Lahiji, “The Baroque Idea: Lacan contra Deleuze, and Zizek’s
Unwritten Book!,” International Journal of Zizek Studies 5.2 (2011): 393–412.
140 Tom Conley, “Translator’s Foreword: A Pleas for Leibniz,” in Deleuze, The
Fold, xi.
141 Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms
142 Jan Kott, “Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?,” in John Elsom, ed., Is
Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? (London and New York: Routledge,
1989), 10–16; 11.
143 John R. Roberts, “John Donne, Never Done: A Reassessment of Modern
Criticism,” John Donne Journal 23 (2004): 1–24; 7–9.
144 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Town-
send, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 57–82.
145 Janel Mueller, “Women among the Metaphysicals: A Case, Mostly, of Being
Donne For,” in Arthur Marotti, ed., Critical Essays on John Donne
(New York: Hall, 1994), 37–48, is an eloquent definer of this complexity
in Donne.
146 Theresa M. DiPasquale, “Donne, Women, and the Spectre of Misogyny,” in
Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester, eds., The Oxford
Handbook of John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 678–89.
147 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 1.
148 Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 225–39.
149 See Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material
World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 204–210, for an expanded discussion of
some of the contours of the shift between Modernist and Postmodernist
aesthetic paradigms.
150 I am relying on Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), for the theory of
aesthetic Postmodernism. While technological change has accelerated since
Jameson wrote this study, the “logic” behind it has remained remarkably the
same. A few attempts to define a “new,” post-Postmodernist aesthetic have
not been very convincing.
151 Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (Mar./
Apr. 2015): 101–32. See also Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young, and Gene-
vieve Yue, “Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson,”
Social Text 127, 34.2 (June 2016): 143–60.
152 Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare, 20–27, 33–35.
153 Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare,
Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1983), 219.
154 Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 136–37.
155 Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance
Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118–64.
156 Strier, Resistant Structures, 118.
157 John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981).
158 Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet; Goldberg, James I and the Politics of
Literature; and Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renais-
sance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 159–217.
159 Stanley Fish, “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,” in
Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century Poetry, ed.
Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: Chicago Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 223–52; 223.
160 Fish, “Masculine Persuasive Force,” 228.
161 Heather Dubrow, “‘Some New Pleasures’? Donne’s Lyrics and Recent Crit-
ical Approaches,” Presidential Address, Annual Meeting of the John Donne
Society, Baton Rouge, LA, Feb. 18–20, 2016. My thanks to Heather Dubrow
for providing me with a transcript of her presentation.
162 Dubrow, “‘Some New Pleasures.’”
163 Sean H. McDowell, “Making the Present Speak: ‘The Extasie’ behind
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Chanson d’Aventure,’” John Donne Journal 30 (2011):
195–209.
164 Judith Herz, “Under the Sign of Donne,” Criticism 43.1 (2001): 29–58, and
Herz, “Tracking the Voiceprint of Donne,” John Donne Journal 26 (2007):
269–82.
165 Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation
England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 160–65.
166 Cf. a similar argument in Christopher Warley, Reading Class through Shake-
speare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
73–80.
167 Leah S. Marcus, “Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama,”
Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32 (1992), 361–406; 361–65, and
Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London:
Routledge, 1996).
168 Stephen Greenblatt, “General Introduction,” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed.
Stephen Greenblatt, 1–76.
169 Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), xii.
170 Eric Rasmussen, “The Year’s Contribution to Shakespeare Studies: 3. Edi-
tions and Textual Studies,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 343–57; 353.
171 Gary A. Stringer, “General Introduction,” in Donne, The Variorum Edition of
the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2005), vol. 7, part 1, l.
172 Stringer, ed., “General Introduction,” in Donne, The Variorum Edition of the
Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7, part 1, xlvii.
173 See Kahn, The Future of Illusion, 1–10, for a revealing summary of this
cultural turn.
174 See Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York:
Routledge, 2003), for a good overview of Derrida’s work since the beginning
of his dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas in the 1980s. A convenient selection
of essays from this period is Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar
(London: Routledge, 2002). See also the entire issue of the journal Religion
and Literature 38.3 (Autumn 2006) for a series of articles on the importance of
religion to general cultural understanding.
175 See Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 225–39, for a discussion of this
evolution of criticism in early modern studies up to 2009.
176 See R. V. Young, Jr., “Donne, Herbert, and the Postmodern Muse,” in John
R. Roberts, ed., New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious
Lyric (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 168–87, for an early
argument advocating interpreting Donne through Postmodernist lenses.
177 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings, 4: 391.
178 Also appearing recently (and coming to my attention very late in this writing
process) is Warley, Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton,
another theoretically Postmodernist contribution to Donne studies, with two
chapters devoted to Donne’s poetry. I reference it briefly below.
179 Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986).
180 See Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of
Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 12–13, for a similar
assessment.
181 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983) 17, quoted in Corthell, Ideology and Desire, 15.
182 Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge,
MA: Havard University Press, 2006), 20.
183 Saunders, Desiring Donne, 19–20.
184 Saunders, Desiring Donne, 20.
185 Johnson, Made Flesh, 27–33.
187 Johnson, Made Flesh, 23–24.
189 Johnson, Made Flesh, 26.
191 Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benja-
min, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Guilford, 1996), 101
194 Deleuze, The Fold, 125.
195 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 336.
196 See, for example, the comments on the baroque as a transition occurring after
the collapse of classical reason in Deleuze, The Fold, 81–82.
198 Hugh Grady, “Unified Sensibility Reconsidered: Reason and Emotion in
Metaphysical and Symbolist Poetry,” PhD dissertation, Comparative Litera-
ture Program, University of Texas at Austin, Dec. 1978.
2
The Anniversaries as Baroque Allegory

Mourning, Idealization, and the Resistance to Unity
John Donne’s two long Anniversary poems embody many of the qualities
Benjamin associated with baroque allegory – especially The First Anniver-
sary: An Anatomie of the World, but continuing in a different configuration
in The Second Anniversarie. In addition to its formal affinity to Benjamin’s
theory, these poems also investigate two prominent features of emerging
modernity: science and aesthetics. Both of these cultural developments
relate to the new world embodied in and expressed by the poem and link
the poem as well to the baroque, a connection defined through an early
twentieth-century tradition, especially in the German-speaking world, of
seeing the baroque as part of the unfolding of long-term modernity.
Walter Benjamin specifically invoked this tradition in his work on the
baroque allegory, The Origin of German Tragic Drama.1
In almost all the versions of the Postmodernist baroque I described in
the previous chapter, the baroque is seen as entwined with the develop-
ment of modernity itself, especially in its contradictoriness. Gregg Lambert
sees it as also involved over time in constant reassertions of novelty, which
are then incorporated within a new “modern.” “‘Modernity,’” Lambert
writes, “defines an act whose desire is to cause the past to pass in its
entirety, without trace or residue; to evoke the arrival of a new moment
that inaugurates the re-commencement of time from this moment
onward” – but a moment that also (and he quotes Octavio Paz) “has been
‘repeated over the past two centuries,’ [a movement that] underscores its
obsessive, repetitive, pathetic and even addictive character.”2 The baroque
is thus in an important sense the first appearance of aesthetic modernity,
but in a form that is in another sense already postmodern. These qualities
apply equally as well to Donne’s poem and to Benjamin’s theory of
baroque allegory.
The disunifying, fragmenting qualities of the allegorical extend into
several aspects of the work. According to Benjamin, baroque allegory
deploys a “disjunctive, atomizing principle at work”3 in several ways, some
64
The Anniversaries as Baroque Allegory 65
of which will be investigated below. What is valued in it above all is “the
fragmentary and the chaotic.”4 Thus Benjamin is in profound agreement
with what Donne writes of the world in one of The First Anniversary’s most
famous lines, “’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone.”5
What I want to argue in this chapter is that the two Anniversary poems
are examples in the lyric mode of the kind of allegory Benjamin defined for
early modern drama (and later Symbolist/Modernist poetry). The perva-
sive melancholy he emphasized as an aspect of Trauerspiel and its allegor-
ical method is strikingly apparent in the first great Anniversary poem, An
Anatomie of the World. But in The Second Anniversarie (and, as we will see
later, in the Songs and Sonets as well), there is a strong strain of melan-
choly – and also an even stronger manifestation of the baroque allegory’s
contradictory impulse toward redemption. This dialectic between critical
satire and utopian longing is crucial to these two poems, and they occur
constantly in Donne’s other work as well.
Situating The Anniversaries

Unusually for a Donne poem, both the date and the occasion for the
writing of The Anniversaries are well known. The poems seem to have been
commissioned by the wealthy Drury family following the sudden death of
their fourteen-year-old child Elizabeth. Donne had not met Elizabeth
Drury in her lifetime, and his initial knowledge of the family seems to
have been through intermediaries – most likely his sister – but subse-
quently he became close enough to the family to travel with them in
France, where he wrote at least portions of The Second Anniversary.
Biographers surmise that the interactions began when Donne wrote a
Latin text used in Elizabeth’s death memorial in Surrey, and this led in
turn to his writing first a “Funeral Elegy” – and then the poem we know
today as The First Anniversary. These two poems appeared in print, along
with an unsigned introductory poem by a second party (generally thought
to be Donne’s friend Joseph Hall) in a 1611 publication – it was Donne’s
first authorized printed poetry – entitled An Anatomie of the World, with
the subtitle Wherein, By Occasion of the vntimely death of Mistris Elizabeth
Drvry the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented.
A year later, in 1612, this poem and its surrounding material were
reprinted, with a new title, The First Anniversary (followed by the older
title and subtitle) in a new volume, which also included the new poem
called The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule, with its own
subtitle, Wherein, By Occasion of the Religious death of Mistris Elizabeth
Drvry, the incommodities of the Soule in this life, and her exaltation the next,
are Contemplated. There was a new verse introduction to the new work,
also thought to be by Joseph Hall, “The Harbinger to the Progresse.”
In the subsequent critical reception of the work, attention has generally
been directed primarily to the two main poems, collectively called The
Anniversaries, and each of these poems is an excellent example of Donne’s
poetry sharing in the spirit of the baroque Trauerspiel described by Benja-
min and using as well the allegorical mode of representation he defined.
But the two poems, while skillfully interconnected, have very different
emphases, with the first one, An Anatomie of the World, more invested in
fragmented, melancholy mourning, while the second, The Progres of the
Soule, develops in a more utopian mode6 making use of the visions of the
Christian afterlife – without ever completely leaving behind its melancholy
account of the secular world. I will therefore discuss the two connected
poems separately, beginning with The First Anniversary.
Like the Trauerspiel, The First Anniversary and the two poems taken
together enact an elaborate practice of mourning, are bathed in an atmos-
phere of melancholy, but also manage to signify a utopian sense of possible
redemption from within melancholy’s ruins. And as in the allegorical
mode described by Benjamin, they avoid organic unity, emphasize frag-
mentariness, and resist unified interpretations.
The First Anniversary

While the term “anatomy” in the original title of The First Anniversary
already had meanings akin to those displayed in Robert Burton’s cele-
brated 1621 An Anatomy of Melancholy, signifying a kind of analytic treatise
on a selected theme, Donne’s general usage of the term within the poem is
metaphorical and relies on a primary meaning of a medical analysis of a
dead body, in this case especially one established by the dissection of a
corpse – what we would call an autopsy, a practice that was well established
in his lifetime. An anatomy in this sense is thus a catalog of (body) parts
once united, now displayed as autonomous fragments. In Donne’s poem
the world is dead, and its parts are now specimens in a similar textual
catalog. It is a fragmented poem in a very basic sense.
Another way to look at the poem’s overall structure as in the spirit of
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel is to recognize its allegorical properties, not only at
the level of its lack of organic unity and its fragmented nature, but seeing it
also as an allegory with an extensive second set of meanings (unevenly)
connected to its enabling fictions. These double meanings are set up by the
poem’s chief hyperbolic conceit, the idea that the untimely death of this
virtuous young girl is the last blow in a long process of decline and decay
that has been the world’s history, and so the world is dead, leaving behind
a corpse for a diagnostic dissection. But this organizing allegory, which
gives the poem its title, is only gradually arrived at in a complex and
shifting narrative that moves through several stages: first, diagnosing
sickness, then namelessness, speechlessness, and amnesia. Finally, climax-
ing these metaphorical qualities, comes death itself, 55 lines into a poem of
474 lines:
But though it be too late to succour thee,
Sicke world, yea dead, yea putrified, since shee
Thy’ntrinsique Balme, and thy preseruatiue,
Can neuer be renew’d, thou neuer liue,
I (since no man can make thee liue) will trie,
What we may gaine by thy Anatomy.
(i: 55–60)
The movement from “sicke” to “dead” to “putrified” exemplifies some-

thing important about the puzzling relation of the two levels of the
allegorical structure of the poem. The overall allegory – the enabling
fiction that the world itself has died – wavers in and out of existence in
the poem. It is established only starting in line 55, and over the course of
the next 400 lines or so it is qualified, redefined, and put in precarious
relation to the sense of hope the poem also invokes in its hyperbolic praise
of Elizabeth’s virtues and its evocation of the consolations of the afterlife.
Indeed, the author of the poem’s verse preface, “To the Praise of the Dead,
and the Anatomy,” picked up on this instability in his observation, “Yet,
how can I consent the world is dead / While this Muse liues?”7 This
wavering, this flickering in and out of the two terms of an allegory, is very
much a part of the allegorical mode of representation defined by Benjamin
and well exemplified by this and other Donne poems.
One example of this quality is that no sooner does the poem’s speaker
announce this conceit of the world’s death than it has to be qualified to
justify the labor of analysis to come:
Let no man say, the world it selfe being dead,
’Tis labour lost to haue discouered
The worlds infirmities, since there is none
Aliue to study this dissectione;
For there’s a kind of world remaining still,
Though shee which did inanimate and fill
The world, be gone, yet in this last long night,
Her Ghost doth walke; that is, a glimmering light,
A faint weake loue of vertue and of good
Reflects from her, on them which vnderstood
Her worth.
(i: 63–73)
And then, as the argument continues, this ghostly glimmering is trans-

formed into a new world, a kind of paradise:
The twi-light of her memory doth stay;
Which, from the carcasse of the old world, free,
Creates a new world; and new creatures be
Produc’d: The matter and the stuffe of this,
Her vertue, and the forme our practise is.
And though to be thus Elemented, arme
These Creatures, from hom-born intrinsique harme,
(For all assum’d vnto this Dignitee,
So many weedlesse Paradises bee. . .).
(i: 74–82)
Thus, before the first quarter of the poem has been achieved, the
argument establishes the two contradictory, even competing allegorical
narratives that give the poem much of its dynamism and resistance to
unification: a dead world of a decayed earth versus a utopian world of
contrary idealization. One way to characterize this, as Louis Martz wrote
in a ground-breaking 1947 article, is to see the poem as attempting to
unite a caustic, deflating satire with a Petrarchan idealization of a
beloved. Martz had Dante’s Beatrice and (especially) Petrarch’s Laura in
mind – beloveds not merely idealized for beauty and virtue, but ultim-
ately seen as celestial figures glorified by God. While the (apparent) lack
of eros and desire for Elizabeth Drury in Donne’s poem makes this
Beatrice or Laura significantly different from those two famous idealized
heroines of Italian sonneteering,8 Martz thought that this combination of
satire and idealization was ultimately incoherent, and he faulted The First
Anniversary for its lack of unity and claimed the second was superior to it
on this very score. Martz saw in An Anatomie “a central inconsistency
which defeats all Donne’s efforts to bring its diverse materials under
control,” claiming the poem needs a “dominant symbol of virtue’s
power.”9 But such refusal of unity and lack of a central, unifying symbol
is precisely what is to be expected from baroque allegory according to
Benjamin; and far from being a fault, this quality is part of what makes
this poem an aesthetic success and a work that shows new facets from our
twenty-first-century perspective.10
Having established a fictional audience for the poem, then, the speaker
begins an earnest catalog of the world’s ills, beginning a section demarcated
in the poem’s marginal commentary as “The sicknesses of the world.” The
catalog begins in Eden and the elemental human functions of procreation
and birth, seen as poisoned by original sin:
We are born ruinous: poore mothers crie,
That children come not right, nor orderly,
Except they headlong come, and fall vpon
An ominous precipitation.
How witty’s ruin? how importunate
Vpon mankind? it labour’d to frustrate
Euen God’s purpose; and made woman, sent
For mans reliefe, cause of his languishment . . .
For that first mariage was our funerall:
One woman at one blow, then kill’d vs all,
And singly, one by one, they kill vs now.
We doe delightfully our selues allow
To that consumption; and profusely blinde,
We kill our selues, to propagate our kinde.
(i: 95–110)
Any reader of the elegies and Songs and Sonets will recognize these mis-
ogynistic, sex-sick themes – except here the tone seems deadly serious,
unlike the wittiness and play of most of the elegies and love poems on
similar issues. There is, of course, an arresting mention of “wit” in this
passage: “How witty’s ruine?” (i: 99). That is, how witty is ruin? The
phrase acts as a prelude to the following grim contrast Donne makes,
defining the transformed effect of women on men after the Fall. The
ruin brought about by original sin was “witty” in that it brought about a
crucial, chiasmic reversal through two overlapping metaphors in which
the compared elements are opposites: marriage becomes funeral and
propagation death.
This kind of wit is, to say the least, little appreciated today but was
copiously illustrated thirty years after Donne’s poem in the compendium
of witty poetic practices compiled by the young Baltasar Gracián in his
Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Wit and the Art of Ingenuity).11 The formal wit
signals, as Gracián notes early in his treatise, that the writer is pursuing not
only (poetic) truth, but also beauty – an austerely intellectual beauty to be
sure.12 It is Donne’s playful but serious contention that Woman, who
according to Genesis was God’s gift to Adam to overcome his loneliness,
becomes his hindrance by bringing sin into the world, setting up a
situation in which a man’s coitus with a woman shortens his life, killing in
the well-known double sense, meaning both to cause death and to cause
orgasm. The ingenious “wit” here is formal and devoid of humor and
laughter. It is instead a catalog of unrelieved mourning, continuing into
the next section on the increasing brevity of life and the diminution of
stature of men according to biblical accounts (and also agreeing with the
Greco-Roman view of the decline of humanity from the golden to the iron
age).13 The idea of progress was essentially an Enlightenment invention,
and Donne’s pessimistic account of human development is one shared
generally by the culture – where it is, however, mitigated by the Christian
narrative of human redemption, which Donne here defers in his hyper-
bolic mourning. But the pessimistic emphasis is an extreme version of a
widespread tendency of the era, sharing qualities with the bitter tone of his
own satires and some of his elegies – or the bitter discourse of late
Elizabethan and Jacobean satirical tragedies (Benjamin would call them
Trauerspiele) such as Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Timon of
Athens, or The Malcontent.
The new scientific and geographical knowledge of the era, which was
encouraged and celebrated by a more optimistic contemporary like Francis
Bacon, is seen in this poem (and in the roughly contemporaneous prose
satire Ignatius His Conclave14) as only adding to the stores of human misery:
With new diseases on our selues we warre,
And with new phisique, a worse Engin farre.
(i: 159–60)
The reference to physic is to what we call medicine and echoes the familiar
complaint of the age that doctors are often worse than the diseases they
aim to cure. The new diseases, it is often thought, probably include
syphilis, quite common in Donne’s London. But physics in the modern
sense – or its subdivision, astronomy – does appear in what became in the
twentieth century the most famous lines of the poem:
And new Philosophy cals all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sunne is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him, where to looke for it.
And freely men confesse, that this world’s spent,
When in the Planets and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his Atomis.
’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;
All iust supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For euery man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
This is the worlds condition now.
(i: 205–19)
This is the passage in the poem that most clearly links the hyperbolic
vision of the world’s decay and death to the actual historical milieu that
conditions and informs it. It clarifies the topical or social meanings of this
challenging and enigmatic poem of baroque hyperbole; and remarkably,
Donne has singled out a truly world-historical moment for central the-
matic development: the pivotal moment of shift from geocentric to helio-
centric understandings of humanity’s place in the cosmos in the wake of
Galileo’s and his contemporaries’ spectacular scientific discoveries. And
Donne focuses on this moment at a time so close to the discoveries that for
many they were simply matters of idle curiosity.
To be sure Shakespeare (among others) had used astronomical refer-
ences as metaphors for a world in decay. One, thinks, for example, of old
Gloucester’s comments to his son on the deleterious effects of “these late
eclipses of the sun and moon” on divisions in the royal family and in his
own.15 Such perceptions of epochal change were “in the air” in the late
Elizabethan/early Jacobean period, and no one, single event is behind
Donne’s pessimistic theme. But there are important differences between
Donne and Shakespeare in these otherwise parallel passages: Shakespeare
never refers to the new discoveries made by the telescopic observations of
1609–10 nor ever questions the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the uni-
verse, which was received cultural wisdom until the later seventeenth-
century digestion of Copernicus’s heliocentric model and Galileo’s discov-
eries.16 In the remarkable passages of The First Anniversary, however,
Donne, just months after Galileo’s discoveries were announced,17 takes
them in and clearly grasps that, as Galileo would famously later argue, they
deeply call in doubt the Ptolemaic cosmos and make at least plausible
Copernicus’s (1543) heliocentric model of the solar system:18
The Sunne is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him, where to looke for it.
(i: 207–8)
The reference to “new stars” alludes to both Tycho Brahe and Kepler, who
each had discovered a nova or new star (Tycho on two occasions) and thus
overthrew the received wisdom of the permanence of the heavens, and to
Galileo, since one of the many sensational reports from his telescopic
observations was the news that the Milky Way can be resolved into a
cloud of stars and that more generally the sky is revealed to be full of
thousands of previously unknown stars invisible to the naked eye but
clearly revealed in the telescope; and he identified previously unknown
mountains and plains (misinterpreted as seas) on the moon.19 Most
famously, Galileo had discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter revolv-
ing around that giant planet and called them the “Medicean stars” (today
they are known as the Galilean moons). This discovery in fact was one of
the strongest arguments in favor of Copernicus’s heliocentric model, since
it showed the existence of heavenly bodies that did not revolve around
the earth.
It should be noted too that Galileo was not the only person who in the
months just before the composition of The First Anniversary pointed a
telescope at the heavens and found new wonders. We now know that Sir
Thomas Harriot also observed the skies telescopically, and in fact a few
months before Galileo did – there is a documented drawing by him of
craters on the moon dated July 26, 1609, about five months before
Galileo’s observations.20 But Harriot refrained from publicly writing about
them – he had already been briefly imprisoned as a suspect in the
Gunpowder Plot and seen two patrons imprisoned for longer terms as
well; and it is reasonable to assume he decided not to risk problems of the
type Galileo in fact later experienced. But it is not impossible, of course,
that in the small world of intellectual London Donne had heard of
Harriot’s observations and was also drawing on these in the poem’s
astronomical allusions.
In these references to the historical discoveries of his day, then, Donne
evokes the theme of a world in transition, the breaking up of an old order
in favor of an unknown, but frighteningly chaotic new one in which the
traditional social hierarchy is crumbling and traditional sources of know-
ledge called in question. Clearly, Donne’s is a version of the retrospective
narrative that we construct to understand the Renaissance as one of the key
transitional ages, moving from a traditional, premodern society to an early
modernity marked by economic change destructive of the old feudal order
and its hierarchies as well as by the slow development of modern scientific
techniques and knowledge.21 And these changes, as discussed briefly in
Chapter 1, are also part of the unfolding of a baroque culture in the
accounts of Gilles Deleuze, among others.22
But for Donne, the Enlightenment’s and our own culture’s optimistic
inflection of these changes is reversed. Instead of the progress the
Enlightenment saw, Donne sees decay and decline, and in this he is very
much like his contemporary Shakespeare and many other Renaissance
intellectuals. For us, living in a time when, as Horkheimer and Adorno
wrote, “The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant,”23 this
pessimism takes on new meaning, just as Benjamin thought the spirit of
the Trauerspiel repeated itself in the depression and spleen of Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal and in the pessimistic Modernist literature descending
from it.
And like King Lear, in which “one daughter ... redeems nature from the
general curse”24 in the figure of the utopian character Cordelia, so Donne
has recourse to Elizabeth Drury, the late deceased, as a female figure of
redemption. But as every reader soon recognizes, the fictional figure of
Elizabeth in this poem goes far beyond the actual figure she is based on.
This allegorical structure, in which the figure of Elizabeth takes on such
extraordinary significance, constitutes the second and competing set of
double meanings that counteracts or even contradicts the first one of the
death of the world as a signifier of deep social and intellectual disorder and
confusion.
Donne begins to build this level of meaning in earnest in the very
middle of his catalog of the world’s and mankind’s ills, just after he has
announced one of the major themes: “’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence
gone; / All iust supply, and all Relation” (i: 213–14). Elizabeth Drury
(though significantly, she is almost exclusively called “she” in this connec-
tion, broadening the reference) is evoked as nothing less than an agent of
unity for the fragments of the world:
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all Magnetique force alone,
To draw, and fasten sundred parts in one.
(i: 220–23)
It goes without saying that this is a fantastic claim to make about a

fourteen-year-old English girl, however virtuous she might have been,
and the extravagance famously puzzled Ben Jonson and doubtless other
contemporaries. There are in fact several traditional concepts or types that
have been proposed as figural or allegorical meanings for Elizabeth, and
I will turn to those below shortly.
But having introduced these extraordinary claims, the speaker then
returns to his anatomy, again concentrating on things astronomical
(i: 251–84) as well as referring to the earth’s uneven, highly irregular
spherical surface (as had Galileo in The Starry Messenger) and the great
depths of the ocean (i: 285–301). The deformed earth, it devolves, is
mirrored by a deformed social world:
The worlds proportion disfigured is,
That those two legges whereon it doth relie,
Reward and punishment are bent awrie.
(i: 302–4)
But then the poem returns to a utopian mode, with a new series of
extraordinary claims made for Elizabeth, this time centered on her virtually
Platonic embodiment of ideal proportion and harmony – like a work of art:
Shee by whose lines proportion should bee
Examin’d, measure of all Symmetree,
Whom, had that Ancient seen, who thought soules made
Of Harmony, he would at next haue said
That Harmony was shee, and thence infer,
That soules were but Resultances from her,
And did from her into our bodies go,
As to our eyes, the forms from obiects flow:
Shee, who if those great Doctors truley said
That th’Ark to mans proportions was made,
Had beene a type for that, as that might be
A type of her in this, that contrary
Both Elements, and Passions liu’d at peace
In her, who caus’d all Civill warre to cease.
Shee, after whom, what forme soe’er we see,
Is discord, and rude incongruitee;
Shee, shee is dead, shee’s dead.
(i: 309–25)
The references to visual beauty resume below with an allusion to “beauties

other second Element, / Colour, and lustre now” (i: 339–40), said to be at
present lacking on the earth after the death of Elizabeth. The latter is
identified as the source not only of proportion, but of color as well:
But shee, in whom all white, and redde, and blue
(Beauties ingredients) voluntary grew,
As in an vnuexed Paradise; from whom
Did all things verdure, and their lustre come,
Whose composition was miraculous,
Being all color, all Diaphanous,
(For Ayre, and Fire but thicke grosse bodies were,
And liueliest stones but drowsie, and pale to her,)
Shee, shee, is dead; shee’s dead.
(i: 361–69)
It seems Donne had been reading in Renaissance aesthetics and the theory
of beauty, very possibly with a Neoplatonic bent, given the references to
Elizabeth as a Platonic ideal.
Donne in fact uses the word “artist” in the next section of the poem, but
it does not mean a practitioner of the “fine arts” (a meaning only coming
into use in the Enlightenment). He is referencing an “art” similar to what
Shakespeare’s Prospero practices, a combination of astrology and the
manipulation of the “correspondences” between heaven and earth to influ-
ence events on earth (without, however, the aid of the “airy spirit” Ariel to
carry out his wishes):
What Artist now dares boast that he can bring
Heauen hither, or constellate any thing,
So as the influence of those starres may bee
Imprisond in an Herb, or Charm, or Tree,
And doe by touch, all which those starres could do?
The art is lost, and correspondence too.
For heauen giues little, and the earth takes lesse,
And man least knowes their trade, and purposes.
(i: 391–98)
This last claim for Elizabeth’s powers, that she embodied the set of
parallels between heaven and earth that lay at the heart of the late
medieval/early modern “Elizabethan world picture,”25 is perhaps the most
startling of all, coming as it does after the proclamation of the coming of
“new philosophy” that calls all in doubt. In effect, the poem announces
both the disintegration of the fullest Western premodern picture of the
world and the advent of the modern, skeptical scientific method that both
derived from it and in the end undermined and replaced it. And it does so
in the deepest spirit of pessimism and mourning. There is no positivity left
on earth after Elizabeth’s departure – all that is ennobling having joined or,
rather, become mystically enclosed within Elizabeth’s soul in heaven.
Elizabeth, then, is clearly an allegorical figure, but she is more the
Beatrice of The Divine Comedy than that of La Vita Nuova. That is, the
series of meanings she signifies rises far beyond her initial appearance as a
flesh and blood character and becomes celestial and cosmological, as in the
following lines:
She whom wise nature had inuented then
When she observ’d that euery sort of men
Did in their voyage in this worlds Sea stray,
And needed a new compasse for their way;
Shee that was best, and first originall
Of all faire copies; and the generall
Steward to Fate . . ..
She to whom this world must it selfe refer,
As Suburbs, or the Microcosme of her,
Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead: when thou knowst this,
Thou knowst how lame a cripple this world is.
(i: 223–29, 235–38)
She seems in fact the very Form(s) of virtue, beauty, and order in a world
seen as dead or dying from their lack.
These notions may be behind Donne’s language in his reported reply to
Ben Jonson’s complaint about The Anniversaries mentioned earlier, that “if
it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something,” but that, as
it was, “Donne’s Anniversary was profane and full of blasphemies.” Jonson
reported Donne replying “that he described the idea of a woman and not
as she was.”26 Donne’s language here could be Platonic, though in this
context not conclusively so. Nevertheless, the meaning of Idea as a
Platonic Form conforms to much of the intellectual content of the extrava-
gant language naming Elizabeth Drury as the source of all virtue, form,
color, and beauty of a destitute world.
In this case, though, one wonders if Donne had not been reading Dante
through, perhaps, Neoplatonic lenses – though the last poems of Petrarch’s
Rime might also have served as a partial model. Martz, as mentioned,
argued that the dead Laura represents the most apt parallel, especially to
the less cosmic Elizabeth of the second poem.27 Unlike Dante, however,
the principle of order and beauty is shown not as the ultimate reality of a
cosmos infused, even in its darkest pits, with divine love, but as something
that has deserted the world and left it bereft.
There are a number of precedents besides Dante’s Beatrice and Pet-
rarch’s Laura, however, for the figure of the cosmic Elizabeth. Martz, in
the article just cited, notes parallels with meditations on the Virgin Mary
(and credits Ben Jonson with perspicacity in his evocation of Mary as a
more suitable subject for the poem). William Empson thought that
Elizabeth represented nothing less than the Divine Logos introduced in
the Gospel According to Saint John, the very principle of order and law in
the cosmos.28 Others (notably Frank Manley) have discussed the relevance
of the figure of Sapienza or Wisdom figured in a number of Renaissance
paintings. Deriving ultimately from the Book of Wisdom, Sapienza was a
female personification of some of the attributes of God, and there are
parallel figures in the Kabbalah.29 Elizabeth’s significations are open-ended
and suggestive, rather than definitive, and poetic rather than philosophical
in the strict sense. Her allegorical meanings are a kind of photographic
negative of the degraded, fragmented, unmeaningful world she left. In a
sense it doesn’t matter whether we call the exalted figure created in this
movement Sapienza, a second Beatrice, or the Platonic Forms. All of these
rarefied conceptions share commonalities with the unique figure created by
Donne in An Anatomie of the World, but the figure of Elizabeth is sui
generis, an ideal that emerges quite specifically out of the empty world the
poem posits. Her cosmic significations seem to me to be primarily a
variation on the central theme of An Anatomie of the loss of world-
historical coherence. She is a figure for a kind of paradise lost, an archaic
world of harmony, correspondence, and intrinsic meaning and beauty.
The poem announces the end of that premodern dream and the advent of
a modernity of fragments. Of Donne too we can say what Walter Benja-
min said of Baudelaire, a poet writing some two hundred years after
Donne, but one who shares many of his qualities: his “genius, which is
nourished by melancholy, is an allegorical genius. ... This poetry is no
hymn to the homeland; rather the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the
city, is the gaze of the alienated man.”30
In the case of Donne, of course, the city had not yet developed into the
phantasmagoric realm of dazzling commodities of Belle Epoque Paris
described by Benjamin. But the world of the Jacobean era presented
enough of Paris’s combination of exuberant vitality and melancholy to
supply Donne with the numerous objects of his conceits and the pervasive
ambience of mourning that this poem displays.31
There is, however, some consolation at the end of this dark work, as
was called for in the tradition of funeral elegies. The consolation
involves another, and in Donne’s age, not-yet-existing sense of the
word “art” – poetry as an art of memorialization and as a placeholder
for all that has been lost and is being mourned. Donne invokes the
example of Moses, who at God’s command had composed a song so
that God’s message might be recalled even in those times when Israel
had forgotten all:
Vouchsafe to call to minde, that God did make
A last, and lastingst peece, a song. He spake
To Moses, to deliuer vnto all,
That song: because he knew they would let fall
The Law, the Prophets, and the History,
But keepe the song still in their memory.
Such an opinion (in due measure) made
Me this great Office boldly to inuade.
(i: 461–68)
The last comparison of this metaphor-filled poem combines prison,
grave, dead bodies, and verse, in a last extraordinary claim, this time
for something like an idea of art as a repository for what has been lost in
the great ruptures of modernity destructive of a unified world and
depriving it of intrinsic meaning and worth. Art in Donne’s First Anni-
versary becomes the compensating marker of absence that is also a new
presence and gift to the world. And this (like its invocation of an
emerging modern science) is another of the poem’s prescient intimations
of modernity.
The First Anniversary is an anatomy of exactly the kind of world
perceived by Benjamin in both Baudelaire’s poems and in Shakespeare’s
and the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiele: a modernizing world of
fragments deprived of intrinsic meaning by the epochal world-historical
changes it had undergone, but presenting the allegorical poet with the
ruins that could be incorporated into new art for a new time.
The Progres of the Soule

As part of the peroration of The Anatomie of the World, Donne announced
his intention to create additional poems of mourning for Elizabeth Drury,
one for each subsequent anniversary of her death:
And blessed maid,
Of whom is meant what euer hath beene said,
Or shall be spoken well by any tongue,
Whose name refines course lines, and makes prose song,
Accept this tribute, and his first yeares rent,
Who till his darke short tapers end be spent,
As oft as thy feast sees this widowed earth,
Will yearely celebrate thy second birth,
That is, thy death.
(i: 443–51)
In a poem filled with so much hyperbole, it is perhaps not to be wondered

at that only one subsequent poem appeared, in the new printed edition
that renamed the pair as The Anniversaries, renamed The Anatomie of the
World as The First Anniversary, reprinted all the material included in the
previous publication, and added The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of
the Soule, with a new preface to complement the Second as had been done
for the First, thought to be by Joseph Hall. No other anniversary poems on
Elizabeth Drury ever appeared after this.
The opening recalls the first anniversary of the death of Elizabeth and
partially retracts the enabling conceit of the death of the world that had
structured the First:
Nothing could make mee sooner to confesse
That this world had an euerlastingnesse,
Then to consider, that a yeare is runne
Since both this lower worlds and the Sunne’s Sunne,
The Lustre, and the vigor of this All,
Did set. 32
But then, very much according to the method of The Anatomie of the
World, that conceit is brought back by two metaphors, the first a compari-
son of the world to a ship that continues its movements after its sails have
been pulled down and the second, much more extended and gruesome, of
a beheaded man who continues to show signs of life in both his severed
head and trunk:
His eies will twinckle, and his tongue will roll,
As though he beckned, and cal’d back his Soul,
He graspes his hands, and he puls vp his feet,
And seemes to reach, and to step forth to meet
His soule ...
So strugles this dead world, now shee is gone;
For there is motion in corruption.
(ii: 13–17, 22–23)
The imagery is exemplary of baroque excess and the spirit of Trauerspiel-

like melancholy. A deluge is then narrated, said to be a “Lethe flood”
(ii: 27) and leading to a general forgetting of the lost maiden, again praised
as “the maine Reserue” (ii: 29) of all good.
And then the tone changes, and we hear notes not sounded previously
in The First Anniversary. There is an invocation of the Muse, here con-
nected to Elizabeth herself as the parent of Donne’s Muse, but with some
deft denial of any sexuality in the “Immortal Maid”:
Yet in this Deluge, grosse and generall,
Thou seest mee striue for life; my life shalbe,
To bee hereafter prais’d, for praysing thee,
Immortal Mayd, who though thou wouldst refuse
The name of Mother, be vnto my Muse
A Father since her chast Ambition is,
Yearely to bring forth such a child as this.
(ii: 30–36)
Against the putrefaction of the world evoked in The Anatomie, there is a
new, less harsh agenda defined for the work of the poem:
And so, though not Reuiue, embalme, and spice
The world, which else would putrify with vice.
(ii: 39–40)
A new, explicitly Christian message enters at this stage, too, signaling this
poem’s shift into a utopian religious modality that complements but differs
considerably from the largely humanist tenor of The First Anniversary:
These Hymns thy issue, may encrease so long,
As till Gods great Venite change the song.
Thirst for that time, O my insatiate soule,
And serue thy thirst, with Gods safe-sealing Bowle ...
Forget this rotten world.
(ii: 43–46, 49)
In particular, the poem sounds a devotional, theological message familiar
to all readers of Donne’s sacred verse, but conspicuously absent in The
First Anniversary: the healing power of Christ’s redemption: “Giue them
those sinnes which they gaue thee before, / And trust th’immaculate blood
to wash thy score” (ii: 105–6).
Slowly, and by degrees, The Second Anniversarie redirects its readers’
attention from a bereft world to a reward in the next and envelops them in
a religious vision of the afterlife in contrast to the focus on a rotting world
in the First – which it, however, continues to evoke, though with lessening
intensity as the poem proceeds to its consoling conclusion. Thus, images of
a corrupt, dead, and/or rotten world are periodically invoked, and the
allegorical conceit of Elizabeth as the principle of order and beauty whose
absence has left the world a meaningless, dead corpse are repeated,
cementing the connection of this poem to its companion:
... in all, shee did,
Some Figure of the Golden Times, was hid;
Who could not lacke, what ere this world could giue,
Because shee was the forme, that made it liue.
(ii: 69–72).
To reinforce the connection as well, we hear echoes of the familiar refrain
from The First Anniversary in the Second:
Shee, shee is gone; shee is gone; when thou knowest this,
What fragmentary rubbidge this world is
Thou knowset, and that it is not worth a thought.
(ii: 81–83)
But we are led from there to a different conclusion from the unrelenting
lamentation of the First:
Thinke then, My soule, that death is but a Groome,
Which brings a Taper to the outward roomme,
Whence thou spiest first a little glimmering light.
(ii: 85–87)
Like Beethoven repeating the themes of the first three movements in the
fourth movement of his Symphony no. 9, before turning to the new sounds
of “The Ode to Joy,” Donne returns to the theme of a corrupt world, with
talk of the worms infesting a corrupt body, and the moment of conception
in sex said to occur “but in a sinke” (ii: 158), the embryo a “small lump
of flesh” (ii: 164) said to “poison” the newly generated soul with original
sin – that is, original sin is said to pass from an impure body to the soul, so
that the soul in the newly conceived body is described as like a
sullen Anchorit,
Which fixt to’a Pillar, or a Graue doth sit
Bedded, and Bath’d in all his Ordures ...
(ii: 169–71)
The conclusion is inescapable: our souls sit even more foully “in their first-built
Cels” of their pre-birth bodies. We are very far from the ecstatic moments of
“The Extasie,” in which Donne saw the body as the fit and nearly coequal
partner to a soul that requires it “else a great Prince / In prison lies.”
This is the preparation for another shift in tone, preparing for the idea
of death as a liberation33 in a fantastically described high-velocity flight
through the heavens:
Thinke thy sheel broke, thinke thy Soule hatch’d but now.
And thinke this slow-pac’d soule, which late did cleaue,
To’a body, and went but by the bodyies leaue,
Twenty, perchance, or thirty miles a day,
Dispatches in a minute all the way
Twixt Heaven, and Earth.
(ii: 184–89)
The next passage recalls us to the astronomical themes of The First
Anniversary (and to passages in Ignatius His Conclave) with their allusions
to the recent astronomical discoveries of Galileo et al. But the soul of
Elizabeth is free from such idle, useless curiosity:
Shee carries no desire to know, nor sense,
Whether th’Ayrs middle Region, be intense;
For th’Element of fire, shee doth not know,
Whether shee passt by such a place or no;
Shee baits not at the Moone, nor cares to trie,
Whether in that new world, men liue, and die.
(ii: 191–96)
The next lines take us through the rest of the Ptolemaic celestial spheres
with their traditional mythological attributes, but she is heedless of them,
traveling as she does so that “as these stars were but so many beades /
Strunge on one string, speed vndistinguished leades /Her through those
spheares, as through the beades, a string” (ii: 207–9).
While there is much skillfully planned continuity between the first and
second installments of The Anniversaries, then, there are also important
contrasts; I have already indicated the far more utopian and positive strains
of the second compared with the first, even while trying to show how
Donne also carries forward into the second many intimations of the first
poem’s themes of worldly corruption. Another significant difference is that
the second poem, without entirely abandoning them, downplays the
allegorical significances of Elizabeth as the female Logos of the world that
were so prominent in the first. Here, she emerges more as a highly virtuous
maiden undoubtedly in her reward in heaven, but much less often the kind
of figure that led Ben Jonson to complain of the extravagance of her
treatment. There is even some suggestion that Donne had now learned
more details concerning the life and habits of his subject, doubtless from
the Drury family he had now befriended. Indeed, he was traveling with the
family in France during the composition of at least parts of The Second
Anniversarie.34 We here references, for example, to her reading habits:
Shee who all Libraries had thoroughly red
At home, in her owne thoughts, And practised
So much good as would make as many more.
(ii: 303–5)
The enjambed line beginning “At home” reinforces the contrast with The
First Anniversary, surprising us with its sudden modification of the previ-
ous pattern of hyperbolic statements about Elizabeth’s virtues, and domes-
ticating them, as it were.
The last half of the poem alternates between the theme of disdain for the
world and its values and the joys of heaven and the company there: the
blessed virgin (with a dig at false Catholic veneration of her, who in
contrast to that is said to find in heaven “Ioy in not being that, which
men haue said. / Where shee’is exalted more for being good, / Then for her
interest of mother-hood” (ii: 341–44). Donne also lists the prophets,
martyrs, and the holy virgins – among whom he enlists Elizabeth. Here,
however, in contrast to the allegorical significations of Elizabeth in The
First Anniversary, she is cited more for her virtues, which are said to be
considerable but which remain on this side idolatry:
Shee, who beeing to herselfe a state, enjoyd
All royalties which any State emploid;
For shee made wars, and triumph’d, reson still
Did not ouerthrow, but rectifie her will:
And shee made peace, for no peace is like this,
That beauty and chastity together kisse:
Shee did high iustice; for she crucified
Euery first motion of rebellious pride:
And shee gaue pardons, and was liberall,
For, onely her selfe except, shee pardond all.
(ii: 359–68)
Even when the rhetoric becomes frankly hyperbolic, it remains within the
realm of possibilities for a human, unlike the role she played earlier –
though it can still be extravagant, as in the comparison of Elizabeth to the
impression stamped on a coin, defining and bestowing value on all other
human actions:
Shee coyned, in this, that her impressions gaue
To all our actions all the worth they haue:
Shee gave protections; the thoughts of her brest
Satans rude Officers could nere arrest.
As these prerogatiues being met in one,
Made her a soueraigne state, religion
Made her a Church; and these two made her all.
Shee who was all this All, and could not fall
To worse, by company; (for shee was still
More Antidote, than all the world was ill,)
Shee, shee doth leaue it, and by Death, suruiue
All this, in Heauen.
(ii: 369–80)
We should also note the shift in the refrain at the end of this passage –
from the earlier formula, “Shee, shee, is dead; shee’s dead” to a perspective
that has shifted from that of earth to that of heaven: “Shee, shee, doth leave
it.” And there follows a meditation on the transitory nature of all human
joys on earth, contrasting with the permanent, constant, “essentiall ioy,
where neither hee / Can suffer Diminution, nor wee” (ii: 443–44). The
ending looks forward to the resurrection of a glorified body that completes
the happiness of heaven:
Ioy that their last great Consummation
Approches in the resurrection;
When earthly bodies more celestiall
Shalbe, then Angels were, for they could fall;
This kind of Ioy doth euery day admit
Degrees of growth, but none of loosing it.
(ii: 491–96)
We recognize the utopian vision that would make good all the defects of
the world that these two often bitter poems have catalogued, and, in the
Second particularly, of a body that has been consistently denigrated and
devalued. Here, Elizabeth’s body (which had been partly but not entirely
exempted from the earlier criticisms) is called a second soul:35
Shee, who left such a body, as euen she
Onely in Heauen could learne, how it can bee
Made better; for shee rather was two soules,
Or like to full, on both sides written Rols,
Where eies might read vpon the outward skin,
As strong Records for God, as mindes within;
Shee, who by making full perfection grow,
Peeces a Circle, and still keepes it so,
Long’d for, and longing for’it, to heauen is gone,
Where shee receiues and giues addition.
(ii: 501–9)
What is remarkable about these celestial moments is how much they echo
(presumably earlier) erotic utopian moments from The Songs and Sonets. In
contrast to this poem’s earlier reference to the body as a loathely “sinke”
(ii: 158), here the idea of the body as second soul recalls the argument of
“The Extasie,” the poem where Donne glorifies the sexual body as the
essential partner of the soul sharing with the soul an ability to express
transcending love. Similarly, the state of a soul that can never lessen but
only grow is very near the state of the love Donne had described in “Loves
Growth,” whose speaker exclaims:
Me thinks I lyed all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’it more . . .
And though each spring doe adde to love new heate,
As princes doe in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the springs encrease. 36
The image of a circle pieced (that is, retraced to make clearer the image but
leaving it essentially unchanged) recalls the celebrated circle traced by the
compasses at the end of “A Valediction forbidding mourning” as another
image of changing constancy – the change as the lovers are separated by the
speaker’s voyage, the constancy of their spiritual union. And it also
contrasts with a prominent strain of the astronomical sections of The First
Anniversary, which included the complaint that the (supposed) motion of
the sun in its orbit around the earth did not follow a perfect circle as had
been assumed by the ancients (i: 251–76).
This poem condemns life on earth, only to return to previously
described privileged moments of it in order to evoke something of the
imagined afterlife. In this Donne was following a quality of the baroque
allegorical vision described in an important passage on Benjamin’s allegory
by Susan Buck-Morss, who argues that it is a central paradox involved in
the allegorical use of “dead objects” from a realm of “infinite hopelessness”:
Now at the crucial point ... allegory deserts both history and nature and ...
takes refuge in the spirit. All hope is reserved for a hereafter that is “emptied
of everything that contains even the imperceptible breath of the world.”37
It is a description as apt for Donne’s practice in The Second Anniversarie as
it is for Benjamin’s analysis of the double meaning of certain of the
baroque allegories of the German seventeenth-century Trauerspiele he
studied.
The Resistance to Unity of The Anniversaries

Louis Martz, in his pioneering 1947 essay on these two poems, thought
that only The Second Anniversarie had achieved the unity and coherence he
thought great poetry demanded. Earlier in this chapter I spoke of a similar
resistance to unity in The First Anniversary, caused by the attempt to
combine such disparate poetic discourses as bitter, caustic satire and a
utopian discourse of high idealization – but seen in the light of Benjamin’s
theory of baroque allegory as typical of the allegorical form. A similar
resistance recurs, but at a more general level, as one tries to define the
relation of the First and Second Anniversaries. Both paired poems have
satirical and idealizing discourses, but in quite different proportions. The
First Anniversary: An Anatomie of the World is, as its title suggests, primarily
an analysis of a fallen, fragmented world of deep decay occasioning deep
melancholy and mourning. The presence in it of utopian images of a
highly idealized and allegorized dead child serve primarily to offset and
display the darkness more keenly. I have tried to show how taking in
Walter Benjamin’s theories of Trauerspiel and baroque allegory should
cause us to question the assumption that such disunity is necessarily an
aesthetic evil; rather, we should appreciate The First Anniversary particu-
larly as a masterpiece of allegorical fragmentation and resistance to
organic unity.
In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule, there is something
of a reversal of emphasis, although it becomes most pronounced in the
poem’s second half. In this poem the focus is more on one of Donne’s
favorite themes (as Ramie Targoff has taught us to see), the relation of body
and soul,38 and this poem presents one of his darkest explorations of the
theme. The body is presented as infected with original sin, a pitiful,
unworthy vessel for a soul that can find its true happiness only in the next
life. At the end of the poem, as I just showed, however, there is a quick
evocation of a surmounting of this situation in the reunion of body and soul
to occur after the Last Judgment, when the body becomes a second soul, the
reunited body and soul forming a more perfect union superior to the angelic
nature. The poem echoes, in its closing moments, a famous passage in “The
Relique.” In the ending of The Second Anniversarie, the speaker is moment-
arily tempted precisely by the line of thought he had imagined in that
shorter lyric, when he depicted the two lovers, whose graves are dug up to
use for new “ghests,” together with one of them wearing “A bracelet of
bright haire about the bone.” He imagines that they will be mistaken for “a
loving couple” (the poem later reveals their love was chaste), especially
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then, he that digges us up, will bring
Us, to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us Reliques.39
At the end of The Second Anniversarie, he uses the same idea (and, notably,
the same word “mis-devotion”), locating himself in
... a place, where mis-deuotion frames
A thousand praiers to saints, whose very names
The ancient Church knew not, Heauen knows not yet.
(ii: 511–13)
The allusion is generally understood to refer to France, where Donne was

traveling with the Drury family at the time of the composition of the
second poem. And he adds,
Immortall Maid, I might inuoke thy name.
Could any Saint prouoke that appetite,
Thou here shouldst make mee a french conuertite.
(ii: 516–18)
So while he is more cautious and circumspect in this poem, he very
interestingly repeats another word from another earlier secular lyric “The
Canonization,” “pattern,” also in a context of unworldly idealization:
Since his will is, that to posteritee,
Thou shouldest for life, and death, a patterne be.
(ii: 523–24)
We recall the famous ending of “The Canonization,”
And thus invoke us: You, whom reverend love
Made one anothers hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole worlds soule extract and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
Countries, Towns, Courts: Beg from above
A patterne of your love! 40
Donne’s celestial utopia turns out, on inspection, to bear a strong resem-
blance to his erotic one, and that should be no surprise. It is, at the least, a
classic instance of sublime sublimation.
Seen in relation to the First, The Second Anniversarie primarily expresses
the utopian dimension of baroque allegory. Benjamin had defined it this
way:
The bleak confusion of Golgotha, which can be recognized as the schema
underlying the allegorical figure in hundreds of the engravings and descrip-
tions of the period, is not just a symbol of the desolation of human
existence. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented,
so much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of
resurrection.41
And he writes a bit further:
And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects,
in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn
into allegories; and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which
they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully
rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea
of resurrection.42
That is precisely the logic of the two-fold structure of The Anniversaries,
though Benjamin generally thought the union of the desolate image of an
empty world and the utopian dimension inherent in it were manifested
more or less simultaneously, as he emphasized, for example, in his study
of Baudelaire. And there certainly is an important example of that rich,
simultaneous ambiguity in the central image of these two poems, the
dead body of young Elizabeth, who at once represents the cruelty and
emptiness of this world and the completion and redemption of it in
heaven.
But it is true too that the poems perform something of a division of
labor, with distinct moments of “melancholy immersion” and others of
compensating, utopian dreaming, and these are unequally distributed
between the two poems, with the First displaying a general melancholy
with touches of relief in the passages on Elizabeth as a source of good,
while the Second begins in recalling the melancholy and the theme of an
empty world from The First Anniversary but then relocates itself in heaven
with a more human but glorified Elizabeth and tends to view the world
from that perspective. It is by far the more traditionally religious and more
serene of the two.
Each poem has had its supporters and detractors – often, it seems,
depending on how much individual critics relish or not religious poetry.
From my point of view, the two form a skillfully wrought pairing, and each
would lose something without the other, so that in that way it makes little
sense to pick one over the other. Both in their way manifest the melan-
choly spirit of the Trauerspiel as Benjamin analyzed it, and taken together
they well express the “dialectical” quality, the possibility of being inter-
preted from the point of view of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil and/or from that of the Tree of Life. But the pair works marvelously
well as a diptych, one poem completing, contrasting with, and comple-
menting the other, each exemplifying in a different way aspects of the
mode of the baroque allegory as defined by Benjamin. As a result, as
Raymond-Jean Frontain noted previously, The Progres of the Soule is the
Paradiso of a Protestant Divine Comedy,43 one of necessity lacking a
Purgatorio – and serving as a continuation and completion of the Inferno
of The Anatomie of the World.
Notes
1 For an account of the debates on the nature and status of the baroque in
German art and literary histories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and for detailed discussions of the sources Benjamin drew on in his
study of the baroque allegory and its relation to modernity, see Jane O. New-
man, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2011), 23–76.
2 Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London:
Continuum, 2004), 55.
(London: New Left Books, 1977), 208.
5 John Donne, The First Anniversary: An Anatomie of the World, in The Vari-
orum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, gen. ed. Gary Stringer, vol. 6
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) l. 213. Subsequent citations to
this poem are from the same edition and will be given parenthetically in the
text. A small Roman numeral will designate the quote as either from the First
or the Second Anniversary.
6 I am using the term “utopian” as it is developed in Benjamin’s critical writing
in several places. His friend Ernst Bloch is the fullest developer of the concept,
and it is important also in the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno and Fredric
Jameson. As I discuss in the next chapter, “utopian” in this discourse lacks
connotations of escapism often associated with it and is dialectically connected
to the material and cultural conditions that underlie it. In this case the
connections between a utopian longing for the bliss of the afterlife and an
“anatomy” of an empty world in decay should be obvious. See Hugh Grady,
Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1996), 191–93, for fuller discussion and references, as well as brief
comments on how the concept calls into question the critique of subjectivity
of early cultural materialism and new historicism.
7 “To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy,” in John Donne, The First
Anniversary: An Anatomie of the World, in Donne, The Variorum Edition of the
Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6, ll. 7–8.
8 But see Ronald Corthell, “The Obscure Object of Desire: Donne’s Anniver-
saries and the Cultural Production of Elizabeth Drury,” in Critical Essays on
John Donne, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 123–40, for a
sophisticated Lacanian analysis of the two poems as about “the process of male
loss and recuperation” (134), with a central component of Lacanian Desire.
9 Louis l. Martz, “John Donne in Meditation: The Anniversaries,” ELH 14.4
(Dec. 1947): 247–73; 256. Much of this article was later incorporated into
Martz’s influential The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious
Literature of the Seventeenth Century, 1954; rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1962), 221–48. Martz’s diagnosis of lack of unity is extended to both
poems in James Andrew Clarke, “The Plot of Donne’s Anniversaries,” SEL 30.1
(winter 1990): 63–77. Patrick Crutwell, The Shakespearean Moment: And Its
Place in the Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1954; reprint, New York:
Random House, 1960), also wrote that The Second Anniversary is “by far the
better of the two” (83).
10 Cf. Corthell, who wrote, “In The First Anniversary the Idea [of a woman] is
mostly felt as absence and loss ... The Second Anniversary gradually pulls away
from the imagery of the world’s decline, recuperating speaker and reader
through a positive identification with Elizabeth as a religious master signifier
of power” (124). Readers familiar with this essay will note several parallels with
my own, though finally different analysis. The mutual affinity of Benjamin
and aspects of Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalysis was pointed out by Julia
Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in
Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 34–59.
11 Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (first ed. 1642; enlarged second
ed. 1648), ed. Evaristo Correa Calderón, 2 vols. (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia,
1969). For a much earlier study of Gracián’s Agudeza and its relation to English
Metaphysical poetry, see Hugh Grady, “Rhetoric, Wit, and Art in Gracián’s
Agudeza,” Modern Language Quarterly 41 (March 1980): 21–37. And see below,
Chapters 4 and 5.
12 “No se contenta el ingenio con sola la verdad, como el juicio, sino que aspira a
la hermosura” (Gracián, I: 54). (Ingenuity does not content itself only with
truth, like the judicious mind, but also aspires to beauty).
13 See Ira Clark, “‘How Witty’s Ruine’: The Difficulties of Donne’s ‘Idea of a
Woman’ in the First of his Anniversaries,” South Atlantic Review 53.1 (Jan.
1988): 19–26, for a contrasting argument recognizing the dissonance of the First
Anniversary but seeing it as a flaw connected to contradictions in Donne’s
“Idea of a Woman,” which includes, according Clarke, deliberate misogyny
within the concept of woman. There are clearly such misogynistic elements,
I believe, but they form part of a larger baroque dissonance that enhances the
poem rather than weakening it.
14 Ignatius His Conclave, a satirical attack on the Jesuits set in hell and written in
Latin, was finished, according to internal evidence, in late 1610 and published
in early 1611. An English translation, probably by Donne, appeared later that
year. Elizabeth Drury was buried December 17, 2010, and the first printed
edition of The First Anniversary appeared in 1611. These two works were
written very close in time to each other, and each shows interest in the
emerging scientific astronomy of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and
Galileo; see John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave, ed. Timothy S. Healy
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 7 (for references to Tycho and Kepler), 13–17
(for Copernicus,Tycho, and the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius), and
81 (for a reference to Galileo). See below, n. 17, for further discussion.
15 This connection was pointed out decades ago in Crutwell, The Shakespearean
Moment, 55–56.
16 Of course King Lear (c. 1606) pre-dated these discoveries, but they are not
alluded to in later Shakespearean works either. The Copernican theory, also
ignored in Shakespeare, dates to 1543, however.
17 Galileo’s The Starry Messenger, which gave an account of discoveries to an
educated but unmathematical audience in Latin, was published in Venice in
March 1610. Donne’s 1611 Ignatius His Conclave, as mentioned, alludes to the
“new philosophers” Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes
Kepler – not, however, as inmates of Hell guilty of innovation and thus
confusing mankind, but as worthy of mention in that context. Copernicus
seems to be in Hell, but he is not admitted to the chamber reserved for the
greatest sinning innovators, and the other astronomers are simply mentioned
in passing. The greatest scorn is directed toward Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit
order he founded, the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius, Machiavelli,
Paracelsus, Columbus, and a few other less familiar names for good measure.
A related skeptical but equivocal attitude toward the new philosophy is evident
in The First Anniversary. Donne’s interest in the “new philosophy” was the
subject of Charles Monroe Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1937) – a pioneering work that needs
correction, however, in several of its supporting details. While Coffin saw
Donne as an epistemological skeptic, he had assumed Donne was sympathetic
to the “new philosophy.” But a closer look will show a negative (or at least
skeptical) attitude toward it – as was pointed out by several subsequent critics.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the
“New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (1949; rev. ed. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1962), also thought Donne’s work displayed a
strong influence from the new astronomy and should be studied as part of the
transition from the medieval to the modern mentality. An excellent summary
of the work of critical correction to Coffin up to 1971 can be found in R. Chris
Hassel, Jr., “Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave and the New Astronomy,” Modern
Philology 68.4 (May 1971): 329–37. There has been in turn a reaction against
these corrections, represented by the posthumous publication of William
Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. 1: Donne and the New Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), a collection of published and
previously unpublished essays in which Empson argues that the young Donne
was not only a Copernican but a believer in multiple inhabited worlds. A more
recent discussion, Julián Jiménez Hefferman, “John Donne and the New
Universe: Retaking the Issue,” Sederi: Spanish and Portuguese Society for English
Renaissance Studies 8 (1998): 71–82, argues that Empson overstated the case but
maintains that Donne was more open to aspects of the new astronomy than
has been supposed in the reaction against Coffin – arguing specifically for an
important influence from Giordano Bruno. For brief summaries of the
numerous critical views on the issue of Donne and the “new philosophy” (as
represented in i: 205–18) written from 1903 to 1988, see Donne, The Variorum
Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, 6: 403–11.
18 While Kepler and Galileo supported Copernicus’s heliocentric model, Tycho
(1546–1601) created his own hybrid theory, arguing that the sun and moon
orbited the earth while the other planets orbited the sun. This hybrid theory
undoubtedly helped shape Donne’s view of a “lost” sun and earth, such that
“no mans wit / Can well direct him, where to look for it.”
19 Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, in Galileo, The Discoveries and Opinions
of Galileo, trans. and ed. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 28:
“The moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface but is in fact rough
and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the earth’s surface, with huge
prominences, deep valleys, and chasms.” Donne alludes to this, with satirical
exaggeration, in Ignatius His Conclave, 81.
20 “Did an Englishman beat Galileo to the first moon observation?” www.guard
ian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/jan/14/thomas-harriot-galileo-moon-drawings.
21 Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 13–18, emphasized the links
between Benjamin’s depiction of the fragmentation of the baroque era with
the contemporaneous scientific revolution.
22 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
23 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944),
trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1977), 3.
24 William Shakespeare, King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blake-
more Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 4.6.205–6.
25 This is the term made famous by E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World
Picture, (1943; reprint, New York: Vintage, n.d.). Tillyard argued that under-
lying Shakespeare’s works, and particularly the history plays, was a stable view
of the world thought of as structured in interrelated layers of higher and lower
beings, with each level sharing the same hierarchical structure, so that the
different layers – the chief ones being the astronomical heavens, the political
kingdom, and the “little world” or microcosm of the individual human –
corresponded to one another and influenced one another. In the turn to the
new historicism and cultural materialism in the 1980s, Tillyard’s diagnosis of
Shakespeare as uncritically sharing this worldview came under acute criticism,
and the idea fell out of favor in the field. However, the ideas of hierarchy and
correspondence are certainly to be found in many early modern texts, and
Shakespeare – and here also Donne – references them consciously and often,
albeit in many cases to put them in doubt, rather than simply uncritically to
reproduce them. See Chapter 5 below for a longer discussion of the issue of
correspondences in relation to Donne’s poetry.
26 Ben Jonson in William Drummond, “Ben Jonson’s Literary Table-talk
(1619),” in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1999), 530.
27 Martz, “John Donne in Meditation,” 249–57 et passim.
28 William Empson, English Pastoral Poetry (New York: Norton, 1938), 84; cited
in Martz, “John Donne in Meditation,” 256, n. 13.
29 Frank Manley, ed. John Donne: The Anniversaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
30 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The
Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
2006), 40. This quote is relevant not only to The Anniversaries but to virtually
all of Donne’s poetry discussed here, and I return to it below several times.
31 See below, Chapter 5, for further development of the connections and con-
trasts between Donne’s and Baudelaire’s worlds.
32 Donne, The Second Anniversarie: The Progres of the Soule, in The Variorum
Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6, ll. 1–6. Subsequent references to this
poem will be given parenthetically in the text and taken from this edition.
A Roman numeral will make clear when a quote is from the First or Second
Anniversary.
33 In an interesting article devoted mostly to The Second Anniversarie, Ramie
Targoff, “Traducing the Soul: Donne’s ‘Second Anniversarie,’” PMLA 121: 5
(Oct. 2006): 1493–508 (and later incorporated in a revised form in her book
John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008),
79–105), argues that the poem contains a latent subtext beneath the conven-
tional celebration of the soul’s liberation from the body at death, claiming that
there is an implied theme of the soul’s mourning the necessity of its removal
from body. This, in turn, it is claimed, is based on a theological position
perhaps held by Donne that the soul is in fact naturally produced in the body
and so bereft at the separation. I believe, however, that the article in large part
understates the strength of the manifest level of celebration of the soul’s
departure, which I emphasize here.
34 R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970),
244–46.
35 This is the point in the poem, I believe, where the subtext of the body’s natural
relation to the soul argued for by Ramie Targoff, “Traducing the Soul,” is
highly relevant. The apparent contradiction is a part of Donne’s allegorical
method, in my view.
36 John Donne, “Loves growth,” The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T.
Shawcross (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 120–21.
37 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 174–75.
38 Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul.
39 Donne, “The Relique,” in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. Shawcross,
142–43.
40 Donne, “The Canonization,” The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. Shaw-
cross, 96–98.
41 Benjamin, Origin, 232. This is another key Benjaminian theme to which I will
of necessity return more than once in the following chapters.
43 Raymond-Jean Frontain, “Donne’s Protestant Paradiso: The Johannine Vision of
the Second Anniversary,” in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New
Perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2003), 113–42.
3
Donne’s The Songs and Sonets

Living in a Fragmented World
Donne’s great collection of love and erotic poetry The Songs and Sonets is
very much a constructed aesthetic object formed independently of the
author’s agency, but incorporating poems of an unmistakable and unique
poetic style. It thus presents itself to its modern readers as a collection of
fragments at a very basic level – and a prime example of the importance of
Benjamin’s insistence on paying attention to a work’s afterlife and not just
its moment of production. It is hard to disagree with Arthur F. Marotti’s
influential conclusions that Donne was a “coterie poet” who produced
singular works for specific, selected readers on specific occasions and that
the poems at their moments of origin are rhetorical performances with
their own value as tokens in a complex but very local social network of
friends and acquaintances.1 At the same time, however, perhaps paradoxic-
ally because of the nature of the printed editions of the poems – and of the
manuscripts underlying them – it is impossible to date individual poems
with accuracy except in the instances of specific allusions to events, and so
most attempts to situate the poems in the “coterie” context have a strong
speculative element, sometimes assuming that the poetry is an unmediated
expression of a specific life situation. For the case of Donne, Benjamin’s
insistence on attention to the afterlife of a work of art as a part of the
artwork itself is more or less a necessity, since its relation to Donne’s
immediate social context, while approachable (as has been shown by recent
scholarship), is also speculative and inconclusive. His impact on subse-
quent generations of readers is an even more important part of what makes
him “John Donne.” Arthur Marotti put it this way: “What modern
idealistic textual criticism, from an author-centered point of view, regards
as ‘corruptions,’ we can view as interesting evidence of the social history of
particular texts.” 2 And as Marotti does not quite say, it is a history that
continues into our own times.
This is especially true, in fact, of the love poems of the Songs and Sonets –
which indeed formed the material for much of Marotti’s discussion of this
94
Donne’s The Songs and Sonets 95
issue. These poems have often been seen by critics as mini-dramas with a
strong fictional element and individually using a variety of different
voices – sometimes female.3 It is true that the passion of the poetry – as
in the case of passionate moments of Shakespeare’s plays – suggests a
strong personal involvement in the writings by their author. But, as in the
case of Shakespeare, it is impossible to be sure which elements of Donne’s
experience are being represented in specific poems. Marotti, for example,
for all the general persuasiveness of his argument, is forced by the logic of
his position to assume in several cases a “sincere” speaker in the love
poems, to see them as the direct expression of the poet in relation to a
specific moment in his life.4 But while literary history shows us that this
assumption can be true in specific cases, it is not universally so, and it is a
questionable assumption to make in the absence of other evidence. While
we can imagine a plausible past social context, we need to be conscious
that such a reading is, in fact, an act of imagination. There is no alternative
to reading them in our present. Dayton Haskin, in his illuminating review
of Donne’s reputation in the nineteenth century, has revealed the extent to
which in the past biographical issues have obstructed a consideration of
Donne’s art – with his often explicit sexuality and his Roman Catholic
upbringing perhaps the two hot-button issues of the day in the Victorian
era.5 With the collapse of the dominant twentieth-century New Critical
practice of focusing exclusively on “the poems themselves,” we seem in
danger of recapitulating in related but updated terms many of the same
arguments. Rebecca Ann Bach’s 2005 polemical critique of contemporary
Donne criticism for downplaying what she sees as Donne’s blatant and
pervasive misogyny is a case in point. The argument focuses on only one
strand of Donne’s complex mixture of discourses and dismisses the rest
because of the sins of that one strand. It sees and condemns a biographical
Donne assumed to be behind the misogyny.6 It is not that there are no
misogynistic passages and attitudes represented in the texts of several
Donne poems, but we need to keep in mind that these attitudes are a part
of a richer fabric, not the whole, and that they are implicated in larger
cultural moments, formed then and now.
In the case of Donne, who has been in and out of fashion over the
centuries and whose relation to what counts as poetry has been very much
an issue for every succeeding cultural era, a Benjaminian “presentist”
approach using our knowledge of the past, but recognizing that such
knowledge is shaped by successive generations in changing critical para-
digms, is as appropriate for Donne as it has been for the otherwise singular
case of Shakespeare.7 In Benjamin’s spirit, we need to find the Donne
most appropriate for our own times while at the same time doing justice to
what scholarship reveals about his own cultural moment.8
The Structure of Baroque Allegory

Benjamin emphasized the fragmented, disjunctive nature of allegorical
unity, but it is important to see that he does recognize that there is a kind
of unity involved in allegories as well – a kind he pointedly contrasts with
the celebrated “organic” unity of Goethe, Coleridge, and Romanticism.
Benjamin developed this notion precisely for the age of the German
baroque in the early to mid-seventeenth century and included references
to Donne’s contemporaries from the seventeenth century, Shakespeare and
Calderón.9 Second, while the term “allegory” may suggest to some that it is
not particularly relevant to the Metaphysical conceits of Donne’s most
famous poems – as opposed to, say, The Anniversaries with their allegorical
treatment (in the more traditional sense) of the central figure Elizabeth
Drury – it is important to see the unique way in which Benjamin
developed the concept of the allegory so that his conception goes far
beyond the denigrating, Romantic notion of allegory that is still widely
accepted – that is, allegory as a figure with two (or more) corresponding
levels of meaning over an extended narrative – and often seen, as Coleridge
thought, as mechanical and empty. I will return to this issue in detail in the
next chapter, but it should be kept in mind here as well.
In his use of the term “allegory,” Benjamin drew on older ancient and
medieval usages in which the terms “allegory” and “symbol” were more or
less interchangeable, and he developed the concept of allegory in tandem
with a critique of what he considered a false notion of totality or organic
unity associated with the Romantic usage of “symbol.” And (along with his
later developer Paul de Man) he saw allegory as both a rhetorical figure and
a strategy for interpretation – especially as a way to critique Romantic
notions of the “natural” relation between signifier and signified that
Benjamin (and of course later de Man and the deconstructive tradition
generally) found objectionable.10 What is most relevant here is the theory’s
arguments about the fragmentary, nonorganic unity inherent in the form.
Rather than pursue the organic unity of the symbol, Benjamin asserts, the
allegorist fills up aesthetic space through a strategy of the accumulation or
agglomeration of a series of fragments: “For it is common practice in the
literature of the baroque,” Benjamin observes, “to pile up fragments
ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal.”11 Furthermore, the inner
logic of allegory resists any attempts at totalization: “In the field of
allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune ... The false appearance
of totality is extinguished.”12 This, I believe, is an apt description of
Donne’s approach to poetic unity, not only in The Songs and Sonets,
but elsewhere as well – for example, as we have seen, in his two
Anniversary poems.
Spleen et Idéale in The Songs and Sonets

There is as well in The Songs and Sonets a striking variety of tones and
moods, in a way similar to that of Baudelaire – Benjamin’s preferred lyric
poet – in the famous dichotomy between melancholic Spleen and utopian
Ideal in the first and longest section of Les Fleurs du Mal. Of course in The
Songs and Sonets there is no explicit recognition of the thematic dichotomy
as there is in Baudelaire – and as we will see below, I believe Donne’s lyrics
fall into three broad and unevenly sized divisions, not two – but the change
of mood is a major feature of the collection that will be addressed below in
terms of Benjamin’s ideas of the allegorical.
I take as a starting point the idea that Benjamin made a central one in
his Trauerspiel book – that, as I discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, the baroque
aesthetic generally was a manifestation of a broader transition to modernity
and one that was consequently reacting to and trying to accommodate the
loss of the medieval loci of meanings, a situation Benjamin summarized as
an “empty world” creative of the disparate reactions of the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation.13 And while the general idea is a familiar
enough one in twentieth-century commentaries on Donne (and still
current in the twenty-first), the peculiar application made of it by
Benjamin deserves investigation; and the insight is too basic to under-
standing the times in which Donne lived simply to ignore on the grounds
that it has, in general terms, long been recognized. In The Songs and Sonets
we can see a highly creative and original poet facing the same crisis
Benjamin defined, but approaching it in his own way.
In the absence of the thematic division of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, we
can still discern thematic clusters and approaches in the various poems of
Donne’s miscellany. Many of the poems share in the general spirit of
melancholy that Benjamin said was pervasive in the baroque worldview,
one in which the world is emptied of intrinsic meaning and bathed in
melancholy and loss. A few are uniquely dedicated to exploring this
melancholy spirit. This is a small group, but it is a significant one,
especially since it contains one of Donne’s very greatest lyrics, “A Noctur-
nall upon S. Lucies Day.” I will begin the concrete analysis of some of the
poems of the collection with this small group, which display aspects of the
melancholy spirit of the Anniversary poems and underline an important
baroque motif that can be found as a less concentrated aspect of the
other poems.
The second grouping – and it is a much larger one – has been
recognized in many previous discussions of The Songs and Sonets: poems
of naturalistic libertinage. These are “love poems” in a sense, but this
group displays a complex of feeling-tones about love and eros, and I will
argue that one of those complex sets of feelings – and an often overlooked
one – constitutes the baroque sense of an empty world – coexisting with at
times desperate assertions of the urges of Dionysian desire. These poems
explore a realm Benjamin calls the “creaturely” and display as well his idea
of an amoral political history that is akin to natural history in the fallen
world of the baroque.
Finally and most famously is the group of Donne’s poems of idealized
sexual love, that remarkable group of poems celebrating erotic love
between equals that is virtually unique in early modern English-language
literature and that has few if any peers in the history of English poetry. The
poems of mutual love can be seen as constructing a utopian, dialectical
counterpoint to the other groups, creating utopian island realms within the
darker ocean of despair of the kind that Benjamin discusses in several
locations, as a strategy both of the German Trauerspiele and within
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. It has obvious similarities to the combin-
ation of emptiness and utopian longing dominating The Anniversaries, with
the significant difference that The Songs and Sonets make erotic experience
central to the contrast in a way not to be found in The Anniversaries.
The World in Decay: Poems of Mourning in The Songs and Sonets

There are only a few poems within The Songs and Sonets that constitute a
section akin to Baudelaire’s melancholic Spleen poems, but they include,
as mentioned, one of his very greatest lyrics, “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies
Day.” I focus on it as the most notable example of the small group of
poems of mourning in the collection. There are also “The Dissolution”
and “The Broken Heart” (which I discuss below as also providing a
transition between the libertine poems and those of mutual love), but
melancholy is a component of several of the lyrics of both the other two
groups as well – all the valediction poems, for example.
Benjamin saw melancholy as a constituent of the baroque worldview
he was attempting to describe, an almost structural component of the
baroque. It was the age’s primary response to the crisis of a developing
modernity unfolding in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For
Benjamin, it had two great early modern artistic instantiations:
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dürer’s celebrated engraving Melancholia I,
which Benjamin referred to as the “genius of winged melancholy.”14
Melancholy can be identified as the affective medium of many of the
age’s great artworks, the characteristic emotional response to the secular-
ization of the world, creative of a de-idealized nature and a de-idealized
history – characteristics that Benjamin diagnoses as hallmarks of the
German Trauerspiele. Donne’s poems of melancholy can be considered
as providing another such example.
In Donne, it is a dominant motif in the many elegies and other
mourning poems among the lyrics outside of The Songs and Sonets,
especially in The Anniversaries discussed in the previous chapter.
Nowhere in the Songs and Sonets is an affinity with the melancholic
allegorical vision of those poems more apparent than in “A Nocturnall
upon S. Lucies Day,” a lyric that presents a vision of the world extremely
close to that of The Anniversaries. It, too, is a poem exploring the aesthetic
possibilities of baroque allegory projecting a baroque vision of a world in
the process of losing its meaning. In this vision nature is generally emptied
of intrinsic significance and becomes available as a set of signs to express
the poem’s mourning vision:
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk.15
Similarly, the opening lines of the poem enlist nature as a manifestation of
human grief:
Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes.
The natural cycle of the seasons and celestial movements is given a new
meaning of mourning. The year’s shortest day (poetically, and using the
old calendar at any rate) becomes an emblem of a man and a world in
mourning. It is a familiar technique of Donne: a “private” event reveals a
world in decay, where nature itself manifests the human situation. Accord-
ingly, the speaker is at once a private mourner and a universal revealer of
the true nature of the fallen world. But the poem’s hyperbole constitutes
complex tonal effects, here and elsewhere in Donne’s work. The very
ingenuity and extravagance of the nature–human connection undermines
the “literalness” of the posited unity of the natural and the human. That is
one of the ways in which Benjamin’s idea of a problematic, troubled, and
strained connection between the terms of the poetic trope in baroque
allegory is so apt for describing Donne’s techniques. Precisely because the
world has been emptied – through “new philosophy,” through commodi-
fication, through the various revolutions of thought playing through early
modern culture – it becomes available for a new kind of poetry that can be
called, in Benjamin’s special sense, allegorical – that is, in this case,
productive of a kind of expressionist projection of the private onto the
(emptied and fragmented) cosmic. This “emptied” nature will return, as
we will see shortly, in the several libertine poems of the collection, though
in different forms.
Next in the poem, the art of alchemy is introduced in an interesting
attempt to mediate between the natural and the human:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.
Love is here personified as an agent working on the internal life of the speaker;
and the art of transformation used by love is identified as a special instance of
a magical alchemy able to ring changes not only on being but on lack of
being – “a quintessence even from nothingnesse.” There is a rebirth (“I am re-
begot”), but it is a negative birth into nothingness. And the poem continues
to exploit this conceit through a number of variations until the end:
I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing . . ..
But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixir grown; . . .
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
Where this poem differs from the Anniversaries that it so much resem-
bles16 – and what makes it a kind of love poem as well as an informal
elegy – is its invocation of figures of hope and renewal in this world, even
within the dark mourning. First, and very fleeting, is the probable allusion
to Christian resurrection in the speaker’s self correction: “her death (which
word wrongs her).” Contradicting an assertion of Benjamin’s that only
Hamlet had been able to “strike Christian sparks from the baroque rigidity
of the melancholic,”17 Donne achieves precisely that in the dénouement of
this poem.
More developed, and responsible for another moment of relief from
grief in this dark poem, is the allusion to young lovers that comes twice, in
stanza 2 and, most tellingly, in the last stanza:
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser Sunne
At this time to the Goat is runne
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all.
It is a moment when the otherwise all-encompassing expressionistic pro-

jection of totalizing mourning is provisionally suspended: there is, after all,
life in the midnight world, and the same Sun who hides his constant rays at
the winter solstice is also sojourning in the zodiacal sign of Capricorn and
promises the renewal of spring and summer – though there is also the
implication, made especially in the first reference to the lovers in stanza 2,
that their summer must inevitably give way to their own winter, and
therefore they must study the speaker’s grief to know what fate awaits
them as their summer fades.
The poem’s conclusion then moves both chillingly and triumphantly, to
transform the positivity of the young lovers into a celebration of a death (in
the spirit of The Second Anniverarie no longer just a mourning), which
promises a renewed love in the afterworld: “Since shee enjoyes her long
nights festivall, / Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call / This hour
her Vigill, and her Eve.” It is midnight, and the chief remedy for mourning
is revealed to be the speaker’s own death. It is above all a mourning poem,
but as such it contains an element of utopian recompense, as we saw for
the case of The Anniversaries in the previous chapter.
There is also a sense, as reader-response critics wrote in the 1970s, that
this is a “self-destructing” poetics, or, as Thomas Docherty argued in his
work from the 1980s,18 an affirmation that dissolves into negation, a
negation that refuses to stabilize itself and hints again of renewal and
affirmation; and some New Critical takes on Donne’s metaphors – in
particular the best of William Empson’s – got at these qualities as well. But
Benjamin’s model of a kind of problematic unity, of a dialectics of
opposites that exist simultaneously, not obliterating each other, but instead
contributing to a complex process of kinetic meaning, is, I believe, a
valuable way of interpreting this baroque poetry.
“The Dissolution” is another baroque poem of mourning that seeks a
kind of consolation, albeit here in the idea that the passions loosed in
mourning may hasten the speaker’s death. It begins with a meditation on
death as a dissolution of the body into its constituent elements, and an
assertion that since the lovers were so closely linked, they “were of mutual
Elements to us” and thus “My body ... doth her involve” – this last word
displaying an older sense, meaning to envelop or tangle. In the deadly
serious but witty development of this conceit, “those things whereof
I consist, hereby / in me abundant grow, and burdenous.” That is, he
assimilates the deceased beloved’s share of their mutual substance into his
own body. The new substance thus created consists of the four elements of
all physical being, here expressed as the bodily manifestations of mourning:
My fire of Passion, sighes of ayre
Waters of teares, and earthly sad despaire
Which my materialls bee,
But ne’r worne out by loves securitee.
The mourning has only increased the “fuell” of his body’s physical exist-
ence and is never worn out because the “securitee” he formerly shared with
the beloved has ceased in her death. Accordingly,
Shee, to my losse, doth by her death repaire,
And I might live long wretched so
But that my fire doth with my fuell grow.
This is the microcosmic expression of the dissolution and decay of the
world explored in The Anniversaries, and it is similar to the sense of
nothingness in the dying world of “A Nocturnall.” The dissolution occurs
at the level of the speaker’s body and its elements (and those of his
beloved). The poem does, however, connect this lugubrious process to
the corresponding political world in a jarring, dissonant conclusion that
presents a miniature version of those dissonant correspondences that made
up some of the fragmented allegories of The First Anniversery:
Now as those Active Kings
Whose foraine conquest treasure brings,
Receive more, and spend more, and soonest breake:
This (which I am amaz’d that I can speake)
This death hath with my store
My use encreas’d.
And so my soule more earnestly releas’d
Will outstrip hers; As bullets which flowen before
A latter bullet may o’rtake, the pouder being more.
Here it is the “little world” of a man that demonstrates the mourning sense
of loss, the emptiness, and the longing that are the great themes of this
small set of poems. They all exemplify the allegorical vision which Benja-
min defined in his Trauerspielbuch:
Everything about history that, from the very beginning has been untimely,
sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head ...
This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular
explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides
solely in the stations of its decline. 19
The Empty World of the Libertine Poems

These two poems allude to love but are more properly focused on loss and
mourning in a fairly direct way. But how does the baroque spirit of
melancholy identified by Benjamin manifest itself in Donne’s more typical
secular love poems? The division between the libertine and the mutual love
poems is fundamental here.20 In the first, sexual pleasure is explored as a
compensation for an empty world that ultimately fails to fill the emptiness.
In the latter, the pleasures of mutual passionate attachment manage to
provide a fulfilling private refuge while the public world remains empty. In
both the world is melancholic, but the subject’s energetic response to the
emptiness produces a different mode of remarkable poetry. I begin with
the first group.
Famously, Donne’s Songs and Sonets contains a large, dispersed group of
poems that have delighted some and appalled others. Variously called
youthful, misogynistic, libertine, or cynical, these are poems that either
celebrate masculine sexual pleasure in contexts where the female sexual
partner is merely an object and/or a conquest, which claim with a variety
of affects that true mutual love is an impossibility, or that express memor-
able recriminations (bitter, funny, or both) against a particular woman or
women in general – usually because of their alleged promiscuity and
inconstancy or disdain for the poetic speaker.21 These were probably high
on the list of the poems Donne seems to have regretted having written as
he contemplated taking holy orders (though we have no direct information
on specific poems). But they constitute a substantial portion of the Songs
and Sonets and of Donne’s received image. And they can be seen as
forming a kind of bridge between the lamentation for an empty world of
“S. Lucie” and the celebration of mutual, erotic love in the last set of
poems in the Songs and Sonets to be discussed below.
What they share with “S. Lucie” is a view of a fallen, empty nature – but
here made into a possible realm of natural sexual pleasure that challenges
the pervasive power of the kind of mourning Benjamin found in the
Trauerspiele – and which is clearly present in The Anniversaries and
“S. Lucies Day.” In the empty world of the Trauerspiele, political history
is treated as a Benjaminian natural history in which there was no connec-
tion between morality and the historical and in which there is “no other
historical activity than the corrupt energy of schemers.”22 Citing a German
study of the term from 1976,23 Beatrice Hanssen defines the idea of natural
history drawn on by Benjamin as follows: “Natural history usually refers to
the atemporal ahistorical conception of nature typical of the natural
sciences and common before the advent of evolution theory of the histor-
icization of nature that took place in the eighteenth century.” Based on the
preevolutionary classifications of Linnaeus, such a view of nature was a
“classificatory, taxonomical, topological and therefore essentially spatial
conception.”24
In the love poems generally, we find few specific references to political
history per se (such as occur in the historical Trauerspiele Benjamin
analyses), but there are references to contemporary politics, as in the
example from “The Dissolution” quoted above. And there is a consistent
picture of nature that shares important aspects of the melancholy, fallen
nature described by Benjamin in his concept of natural history – but in
Donne, with varied affect, in addition to the melancholic one emphasized
by Benjamin.25 In short, one important difference of several of the poems
in The Songs and Sonets from The Anniversaries is that contemporary
politics plays much of the role that was taken by the motif of new
knowledge and new philosophy in The Anniversaries. Both define the
historical context in which the poems were written. Besides the one in
“The Dissolution,” there are others, such as the inauthentic world of
politics invoked in “The Sunne Rising” or “Loves Growth.”
This political theme in The Songs and Sonets, then, is analogous to the
one Benjamin assigned to history in the German Trauerspiele: “In allegory
the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a
petrified, primordial landscape.” 26 Facies hippocratica is a medical term
referring to the characteristic expression of a face at or near death, and thus
Benjamin’s history is linked with death and is unredeemed and full of
sorrow. The baroque allegory, he asserts, arises in a conflation of nature
and history in which history is signified through images of a natural, reified
world without organic unity and without moral meaning. For Benjamin,
the treatment of history as a process of nature implies an amoral world
whose emptiness is bathed in a generalized sense of guilt. It is a concept
not identical with, but sharing many of the features of, the concept of
instrumental reason that Horkheimer and Adorno would make so central
to the disastrous unfolding of modernity in their Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment. In this there is a kind of convergence from two different moments
within the unfolding of modernity. Donne, steeped in Scholastic learning
and humanist erudition, shares the Roman view of a world growing worse;
Horkheimer and Adorno, in contrast, react against the prevalent move-
ment within post-Enlightenment modernity for the idea of progress,
famously writing, “The fully enlightened world radiates disaster
triumphant.”27
In Donne’s version of this baroque conceptual configuration, the histor-
ical past is less important than the contemporary political and commercial
world that forms the backdrop of so many of his poems. But this “public”
realm is an empty one following the spirit of the baroque – and the logic of
the commodity and of early modern political instrumental reason.28
The situation is especially complex, however, because in the libertine
poems this melancholic natural realm is also a locus for an amoral sexual
drive with multiple potentials to be explored poetically. There is a mark-
edly Dionysian element in Donne’s love poetry as well as the rational
Apollonian one on which the critical tradition has largely focused. Several
poems evoke a sexual golden age of desire fulfilled – but always as a
mythical past utopia longed for but missing in the poem’s present. Overall
in these poems, the world is a fragmented, objectified, alien realm indiffer-
ent or hostile to human desire.
We get a quick glimpse of this realm in a brief phrase made in passing in
“The Relique” (which, however, is not, as I read it, one of the libertine
poems – I return to it below in a different context) as the speaker
introduces the idea that the poem’s lovers have been chaste despite their
mutual attraction:
Our hands ne’r toucht the seales,
Which nature, injur’d by late law, sets free.
The same idea is promulgated in much greater detail in one of the Elegies,
“Variety,”29 a poem to be sure with tongue-in-cheek qualities, but which
nevertheless expresses the kind of erotic utopian vision implied in many of
the libertine poems’ celebration of a sexual golden age:
How happy were our Syres in ancient times,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!
With them it was accounted charity
To stirre up race of all indifferently;
Kindreds were not exempted from the bans:
Which with the Persians still in usage stands.
Women were then no sooner ask’d then won,
And what they did was honest and well done.
But since this title honour hath been us’d,
Our weake credulity hath been abus’d;
The golden laws of nature are repeald,
Which our first Fathers in such reverence held;
Our liberty revers’d and Charter’s gone.
And we made servants to opinion.30
The poem goes on to assert that “Onely some few strong in themselves and
free/ Retain the seeds of antient liberty” (ll. 61–62) – that is, the speaker
claims that it is possible to reinvent the erotic golden age in the poem’s
present with a strong enough will.31 But for the most part in the various
poems, that fervent wish remains just that. The mythical era of free love is
generally a marker of the frustrations of the poetic speaker’s present, as in
the lament of “Confined Love”:
Are Sunne, Moone, or Starres by law forbidden,
To’smile where they list, or lend away their light?
Are birds divorc’d, or are they chidden
If they leave their mate, or lie abroad a night?
Such lamentation is common among the many disparate speakers of most
of the libertine poems.
We see this realm of amoral nature again in “Farewell to Love,” but here
the emptiness of that realm is quite apparent. After a somewhat difficult
allusion to what seems to be an instance of children quickly tiring of a new
toy they had obtained from a fair, which “Is not lesse cared for after three
dayes / By children, then the thing that lovers so / Blindly admire,” the
poem focuses on the theme of postcoital depression, interrogating the
purposes for which Nature would have created such a psychological effect
for so vital a biological function as the reproduction of the species – with
an allusion to a cultural commonplace derived from Roman sources, the
belief that lions and cocks are immune from such depression:
Ah, cannot wee,
As well as Cocks and Lyons, jocund be,
After such pleasures, unlesse wise
Nature decreed (since each Act, they say,
Diminisheth the length of life a day)
This; as shee would man should despise
The sport,
Because that other curse of being short,
And onely for a minute made to be
Eager, desires to raise posterity.
Critics and editors have rightly expressed puzzlement over the exact sense of
these elusive lines. Is the “other curse of being short” that of human
mortality, which could be seen as a stimulus to eagerness through the desire
for “posterity” in the sense of children? Or does it refer to the shortness of
the sexual act, the term “posterity” referring to further continuations of the
act, not the children that might be produced from it? Or, as I think, does
the “curse of being short” indeed refer to the brevity of sexual pleasure while
the reference to posterity does denote offspring, but as the design of
“nature” rather than the immediate psychology of sexual desire?32
My main point, however, is that human sexual desire in this (and
similar poems) is seen as a function of a nature that we share with animals
and that produces us as subject to powerful animal impulses that can leave
us depressed, however much they may serve higher purposes of which the
actors need not be (and usually are not) aware. In these poems Donne puts
us in the realm that Benjamin referred to as “the creaturely,” an adjective
that denotes the qualities and domain of “the creature.” The term has at
least two meanings. On the one hand, according to Beatrice Hanssen,
there is, in the Trauerspielbuch and subsequently, a “conception of the
creaturely as the realm of the passions, mythical guilt, wanton melancholy,
and animality – in short, a fallen nature on this side of transcendence and
revelation.”33 At the same time, she argues, there is another – a “more
positive, benign conception.” She goes on to identify this as a more
affirmative openness to nature, a stance that is derived from certain Judaic
traditions and the idea of the “just man (der Gerechte) who, as the advocate
of the creatural (Fürsprech der Kreatur) was also its highest embodiment.”34
It is the sense of “fallen nature” that is most germane in Donne’s
libertine poems and in baroque aesthetics generally, however much a sense
of the positivity of the natural exists as a subtext as well. “The creature is
the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed by the
baroque,” Benjamin writes, explaining that the age of the Trauerspiele saw
no virtue at all in historical life.35 That was one reason they had frequent
recourse to scientific metaphors to explain human events.36 And these
ideas also capture important aspects of the world of the libertine poems.
In “Confined Love,” to take a very specific instance, a fallen world of
constrained sexuality is linked to an “eternal” male passion for sexual
exclusivity, the desire of “Some man unworthy to’be possessor / Of old or
new love, himselfe being false or weake.” As a result of this creaturely
condition, the human encroaches on the natural and goes on to invent a
law in force ever since, that a woman “should but one man know.” There is a
very baroque paradox at work here: the original creaturely world, imperfect
as it was, was also a realm of freedom lost in a more constrained age. The
poem’s world is still “creaturely” in the sense of being “the realm of the
passions, mythical guilt, wanton melancholy, and animality” that Hanssen
described. But it now lacks the sexual freedom of its mythical origins.
Of course, the homemade mythology of this poem is evidently flippant
and not to be taken too seriously. As one result, the tone is complex, at one
level seeming to be a joke involving a logically specious analogy. But it is
another good example of the amoral “creaturely” world that is constantly
evoked in the libertine poems. We see this clearly when the poem’s middle
stanza contrasts the manmade prohibition with the natural laws of the
animal world, in which sexual promiscuity is the norm. The creaturely
world is once again invoked as a realm of sexual pleasure open to both male
and female exploitation.
This realm of natural libertinage has been described several times in the
history of Donne studies – but in ways that tend to neutralize its scandal-
ous – and melancholic – qualities. Perhaps the earliest such essay is from
1923, by Louis I. Bredvold. Bredvold notices the pervasive use of this
concept of an amoral natural world in many of the Songs and Sonets, and
he argues that Donne took the idea seriously at one level or other of his
thinking. He argues that Donne’s poetic libertinism results from serious
study, not whimsy, and that it is connected to a skeptical worldview
entertained by Donne at least in the years these poems were composed.37
Like most old historicists, Bredvold is then concerned with the sources of
these ideas, identifies some ancient and even medieval ones, but decides
Donne’s most likely source was in the Essais of Montaigne.
What this strategy accomplishes is to naturalize, even contain, this still
scandalous Dionysian motif in the history of ideas in order to show that
Donne was following a trend of his age, and that he was not, as With-
erspoon and Warnke had warned against in a textbook, “our own contem-
porary, ... a strangely modern figure who speaks to us in our own accents
across the centuries.”38 As Dayton Haskin has demonstrated (see, Chap-
ter 1), Donne was still being criticized at the end of the nineteenth century
for his sexual licentiousness, and by showing the intellectual respectability
of the idea in a scholarly context, Bredvold is in effect “rescuing Donne”
from his puritanical critics by linking them to intellectually respectable
sources.39
When Robert Ornstein updated Bredvold’s argument some three
decades later, he went even further in insulating Donne’s poetry from
critics of libertinage. Ornstein in effect exempts lyric poetry from the status
of philosophical discourse altogether, arguing that the parallel with Mon-
taigne on this and related issues is to be found not in the lyrics but in
Donne’s prose works, particularly the Biathanatos.40 For Ornstein, in
effect, the invocation of a realm or era of free love occurs in these poems
as a signifier of desire, not as a moral doctrine or philosophical argument.
It is thus, in effect, an indicator of the sorrows of a world in which desire is
constantly resisted. And as such it is another feature of Donne’s poetry that
links it to Benjamin’s description of a baroque aesthetics of mourning and
melancholy. Donne’s amoral nature is akin to Benjamin’s notion of a
creaturely, fallen nature of fragmentation and melancholy – one in which,
however, the possibilities of redemption are present as well.
In most of these poems, as I noted previously, the libertine nature
referenced by Donne is notable by its absence in the present; it is
something that existed once and can be recreated only intermittently and
uncertainly. It exists as a ruin from the ancient world, and as such is
subject to a variety of poetic uses, not the least of which is to underline the
frustration, disappointment, and emptiness of the empirical world Donne
inhabits.
But the emptiness of these libertine poems is not only a matter of regret
at the frustrations of desire. When Benjamin described the world of the
baroque Trauerspiele as “empty,” he was predominantly referring to the
epochal change in cultural frameworks between, speaking broadly,
the medieval and the (early) modern. Taking Germany as his context, he
specifically named German Lutheranism, with its deprecation of the
efficacious power of “good works” for salvation,41 as well as counter-
Reformation Catholicism, with its instrumentalistic emphasis on the cen-
trality of creating a Catholic world, “a golden age of peace and culture, free
of any apocalyptic features, constituted and guaranteed in aeternum by the
authority of the Church.”42 The result was a desacralization of nature, one
that transformed the status of imagery in poetry, among other things. As
I mentioned in Chapter 1, Benjamin later focused on the development of
the commodity form in modernity, and later theorists stressed instrumen-
talist approaches to nature and to politics as important aspects of Renais-
sance intellectual developments that also contributed to the changeover.43
In the case of Donne and his intellectual context, these latter develop-
ments – the “new philosophy,” the general challenge to received religious
orthodoxy of the Reformation (and its corollary, Renaissance skepticism),
the rise of an impersonal national state, the articulation of norms of
Machiavellian instrumental politics in the era’s new theories of sover-
eignty, and the steady development of a capitalist economy – are among
the most important factors in creating a sense of emptiness.
In other words, Donne’s empty world – the baroque empty world – is,
as it were, modernity in the moment of its first unfolding. We are still
trying to fill it out and using many of the strategies employed by Donne –
above all, a new emphasis on sexuality, the personal sphere, and sexual
love. And as in the similar case of Baudelaire, such changes also led (as so
many literary historians have observed) to a new Dionysian energy and,
paradoxically, a new positivity within the overall sense of crisis, as well as to
melancholy. In Donne’s libertine poems these qualities are associated with
the strength of desire as a source of pleasure as well as of frustration,
aggression, and destruction. The world of these poems is empty in one
important sense, but full of potential in another. Libertinage is like the
ruins that Benjamin sees as the domain of allegory. The dissolution of
humanity into animality explored in many of these poems has its pleasures
as well as its pains, just as allegory always has more than one interpretation.
Love between Ovid and Petrarch

Numerous critics have described Donne’s exploration of love and eros in
terms of a discursive war between the Ovidian and the Petrarchan. In the
terms I have been using here, the domain of the creaturely and a fallen
nature could clearly be described as the domain of Ovid, especially the
Ovid of the Amores.44 In Ovid and in Donne’s libertine poems, love
(perhaps better termed “eros” in this context) exists in a network of
exchange within the larger system of reified rules analogous to those
governing power and commerce. As the various attempts at histories of
love struggle to explain, Ovidian desire has affinities with our own culture’s
depictions of sexual love/desire, but without the complex idealization of
the Lady and of the experience of love itself featured in later Troubadour,
Petrarchan, and Renaissance love poetry – and beyond. Donne of course is
no stranger to this latter tradition either, and several of his great love lyrics
continue it and innovate within it brilliantly, as has long been recog-
nized.45 But in the poems of libertinage the Ovidian world of amoral
desire is much more prominent than in the poems of mutual love for
which Donne is perhaps most famous – and to which I will turn below.
Donne has been connected with Ovid many, many times, both in
Donne’s critical history and in the large literature on Ovid’s use in early
modern English poetry.46 Many of the connections were written in the
mode of the “old historicism” and functioned for the case of Ovid as
Bredvold’s argument did for Donne’s natural libertinage – to make
respectable ideas that were potentially scandalous47 – or they have seen
Ovid as providing generic forms that Donne appropriated for his own
poetry.48 But the connection has also found more recent and more critical
investigators, notably Daniel Moss’s 2014 The Ovidian Vogue. This lively
book treats Donne in its final chapter, naming him “the period’s premier
post-Ovidian.” What he means is that while Donne (massively) alludes to
Ovid in genre, posture, and sometimes tone, he avoids the mythologizing
borrowed from Ovid by many of Donne’s contemporaries, in effect
critiquing and supplanting “the sterility of traditional imitative models.”49
In other words, Donne uses Ovid, rather than directly imitating him. And
nowhere is such use clearer than in the group of libertine poems, which
evoke an Ovidian amoral realm of nature like a ruin from the ancient
world, but taking it as a territory, playground, and battlefield – very much
in the spirit rather than the letter of Ovid’s erotic poetry, and transferring
it and transforming it for a different, Christianized world.
This transformation is analogous to the medieval and early modern
allegorizing of the Greco-Roman gods, something Benjamin ascribed to a
desire to preserve their vitality within a Christian world.50 And there is also
a strong sense of despair and meaninglessness, along with much rueful
humor. The poems investigate what they claim to be the inevitable
disappointments of love, the power struggles between men and women
playing a high-stakes, potentially deadly game of seduction with each
other, the pleasures and the pains of seduction. And this terrain seems to
be unredeemable, explicitly so in “Womans Constancy,” where the speaker
berates his mistress for her witty (and Donne-like) pseudo-logical argu-
ments against constancy in love with the retort:
Vaine lunatique, against these scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would,
Which I abstaine to doe,
For by to morrow, I may thinke so too.
There is a contradictory set of pseudo-commercial activities going on here:

an investment, a withdrawal, and finally a declaration of indifference that is
belied by the passions of the rest of the poem. The game is too frustrating
to indulge in, but the potential reward seems worth the price – or maybe
not. This is a tempting but ultimately frustrating world leading to loss and
(here disguised) mourning.
Irony or Ambiguity?
Some have suspected a satirical or ironic purpose in at least some of the
libertine poems, but perhaps it is better to understand what has been called
irony (which depends on defining a specific intention within the poem) as
a baroque tension between two different visions, that is, between different
constructions of reality – and an unrealized longing to unite them. We
might consider, for example, the two “places” linked in “Loves Usury”:
a world of unsatisfying erotic love and a debased domain of usurious loans.
The poem opens with a proposed high-interest loan requested of a per-
sonified Love or the god of love:
For every houre that thou wilt spare mee now,
I will allow,
Usurious God of Love, twenty to thee,
When with my browne, my gray haires equall bee;
Till then, Love let my body raigne, and let
Mee travell, sojourne, snatch, plot, have, forget,
Resume my last yeares relict: thinke that yet
We’had never met.
As the next stanzas develop, it becomes clear that the speaker is offering
constancy in love when he is older if he – or rather his body (“Love let my
body raigne”) – is given freedom in the creaturely realm of nature discussed
above. The poem is very reminiscent of St. Augustine’s double-edged,
ambiguous prayer in his Confessions: “‘Grant me chastity and continency,
but not yet.’”51 In both cases homage is paid to the power and value of
pleasure, even as its limitations are also posited. And in both cases, the
solution of having both pleasure and repentance is proposed surrounded
with a sense of contradiction – but also never declared impossible. Donne of
course was famously praised as a second Augustine in Walton’s Life, and he
shares here something of the older repentant’s urgent seriousness about both
pleasure and virtue. The opening bargain suggests “cynically” that love is a
trap to be avoided as long as possible for the pursuit of pleasure – with the
implication that the pleasure of sex unencumbered by love is so great as to
warrant “twenty times” more fidelity in middle and old ages. This accept-
ance of eros, figured (in the terms of the opening bargain and the poem’s
title) as usurious and therefore unjust and undesirable, is puzzling, inas-
much as it posits as a grudging concession for a wild youth the kind of
mutual love celebrated in the most famous poems of The Songs and Sonets:
Spare mee till then, I’ll beare it, though she bee
One that loves mee.
The sentiment is reminiscent of the endings of “Song” and “Womans
Constancy,” but both of these poems include in their layered and complex
feelings a suggestion of regret at the unlikelihood of mutual love – and
underneath that, perhaps, a yearning for it, disguised by “cynicism.”
In libertine poem after libertine poem, then, an empty world is repro-
duced, but it is seldom accepted unconditionally. An aura of disappoint-
ment, discontent, and longing for something else is part of the atmosphere,
creating the sense of longing within an empty modernity. Ronald Corthell
notices something similar as he ends his bravura analysis of the contradictory
dialectic between the Ovidian and the Petrarchan in the quintessentially
libertine poem “The Indifferent,” which, he says, “like many of Donne’s
most brilliant exercises of wit, is a perplexed and unhappy poem.”52
“Loves Alchymie” is a similar and even more complex case. The poem is
skeptical about alchemy, to be sure, which the speaker compares to the
impossible search that he and many have undertaken to find where love’s
“centrique happinesse doth lie”:
Oh, ’tis imposture all:
And as no chymique yet th’Elixar got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medecinall,
So, lovers dreame a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summers night.
The alchemist is an explorer of the creaturely realm – a lover in the natural,
amoral realm of passion – and that, in addition to the sly sexuality, makes
the comparison with diggers after happiness in a treasure-laden mine apt –
with the implication that both alchemy and loving are fruitless enterprises
that at best might provide momentary solace in an all-too-short “winter-
seeming summers night.”
In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker continues the mode of de-
idealization, going on to denigrate the pursuit of love as a common self-
deception and then railing against the self-deception of those who would
downplay the role of sex in marriage – and who falsely idealize love as a
marriage of true minds. There follows a troubling and jolting concluding
couplet:
Hope not for minde in women; at their best,
Sweetnesse, and wit they’are but, Mummy, possesst.
The misogyny and bitterness of the conclusion climax in the de-
idealization of the poem as a whole – but there is also a clear sense of
disappointment. Most readers need footnotes for the term “Mummy,”
which has multiple meanings (though the one that often occurs to post-
Freudian readers, “Mummy” as an infantile name for a mother, appears to
be anachronistic). Rather, the allusion is to Mummy as dead flesh without
a spirit (or a body without a mind) – and also as a commodity actively
traded in Donne’s time as a medicine. Both senses (mindless flesh and
commodity) fit the context and are clearly relevant. The search for love is
like the search for gold in alchemy, so the logic of the poem goes, because
at the end women are revealed as mere commodities and spiritually dead,
without mind – and not the remedy for illness that they had seemed to be.
This is a fallen world indeed.
The word “Mummy” is especially freighted and shocking, creating a
sense of disdain and contempt for women that transfers also to the speaker:
his quest is as empty as its object, it seems. The project of the “lovers dream”
of happiness is what is primarily called into question at the poem’s end.53 As
in “Loves Usury,” the longing of the speaker for mutual love in the first
stanza, the depth of disappointment and violent anger of the second stanza,
and the comparison with a largely discredited practice like alchemy all
suggest that the poem’s project of desire has to be “supplemented” by
another perception – one that calls its nature into question. In this baroque
reading, the masculinist viewpoint and psychological projection arising out
of this vision of a fallen, amoral nature pose unhappy choices for readers to
confront as the speaker’s subjectivity and worldview are experienced viscer-
ally. We can identify with this subjectivity – or distance ourselves from it.
The notorious poem “Communitie,” which at one level seems to
advocate something like a “natural” sexual community of women that
was part of the libertine credo, clearly both references the realm of nature
under discussion and brings out the potential for misogyny in the idea as
well. After introducing the moral idea of “things indifferent” – things
neither good nor bad in themselves – Donne’s speaker attempts to place
women in that category following the logic of the creaturely:
If then at first wise Nature had
Made women either good or bad,
Then some wee might hate, and some chuse,
But since shee did them so create,
That we may neither love, nor hate,
Onely this rests, All, all may use.
This is a poem that constructs a male audience for itself, constantly

speaking of women in the third person and using “we” in the sense of
“we men.” If women are part of the rhetorical audience, they are so as
eavesdroppers, as it were, listening in on the enemy discussing its views on
them. Stanza 3 seems clearly to place women within an objectified natural
world, via one of those facetious pseudo-logical arguments Donne is
famous for:
If they were good it would be seene,
Good is as visible as greene,
And to all eyes it selfe betrayes:
If they were bad, they could not last,
Bad doth it selfe, and others, wast,
So, they deserve nor blame, nor praise.
As things indifferent, then, women are part of nature and therefore
common to all for the taking:
But they are ours as fruits are ours,
He that but tasts, he that devours,
And he that leaves all, doth as well:
Chang’d loves are but chang’d sorts of meat,
And when hee hath the kernell eate,
Who doth not fling away the shell?
This is another shocking ending, and this quality coincides with the
poem’s strong sense of emptiness. Again the shock of the conclusion
dialectically produces an alternative reading, somewhat like the one of
“Loves Alchymie”: the conclusion is logical, but empty. Such structures are
very much in the spirit of ground-undermining paradox, the quality
described in a classic work by Rosalie Colie that never seems completely
absent in any of Donne’s love poems.54 These omnipresent baroque
qualities suggest that the creaturely state of nature of unregulated sexuality
behind the attitudes of most of the libertine poems is a contradiction-
fraught one fully compatible with a strong baroque sense of the emptiness
of the poem’s world.
In poems like “The Indifferent,” “The Triple Foole,” and “The Appar-
ition,” the element of humor enters the picture and helps a different, but
still complex poetic mode inviting both empathy with the speaker’s experi-
ence and an awareness of incongruities. In my experience teaching “The
Apparition” and discussing it with friends and family, most readers and
listeners, male and female, enjoy the exaggerated sense of outrage of the
speaker because they have all had such moments and empathize with
them, and they complicitly chuckle with the fantasy of the sweat this
imagined revenger for scorned love puts the lady in:
When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead,
And that thou thinkst thee free
From all solicitation from mee,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, fain’d vestall, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sicke taper will begin to winke,
And he, whose thou art then, being tyr’d before,
Will, if thou stirre, or pinch to wake him, thinke
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke,
And then poore Aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lye,
A veryer ghost than I.
The poem is a triumph of capturing and framing an emotion that readers
know is exaggerated but enjoy as such. One common response from
Donne’s poetic speakers from the empty world of these poems is gallows
humor, and nowhere is it better exemplified than in “The Apparition.” But
such semi-comical treatments of creaturely emotions simply give us
another facet of this all-too-human world of fallen nature.
Finally, a few of these poems describe the objectified natural world that
constitutes the field for eros for them, affirm the inherent instability and
shortness of love like the others, but do so with an underlying tone of regret
that amounts less to a challenging subtext than a strong and pointed
interrogation of this vision. The often praised “Song” beginning “Goe,
and catche a falling starre” is an excellent example of this. The poem is
famously structured as a series of impossibilities – catching the star, propa-
gating a child on a mandrake, discovering access to all the past and to the
Devil’s secrets. The tone of the opening is vigorous and assertive, but it
changes and becomes softer in the line that haunted T. S. Eliot enough that
he inserted it into his “The Love Poem of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Teach me to
heare Mermaides singing.” There is a suggestion of longing there that is not
in the earlier images, and it is reinforced again in the opening of the last
stanza: “If thou findst one, let mee know, / Such a Pilgrimage were sweet,”
before reverting back to the dominant cynicism of the ending:
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
Though at next doore wee might meet,
Though shee were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet shee
Will bee
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
There is a strong suggestion here that the cynicism shields an opening to
other possibilities and hopes, which other poems in the collection will
express with great skill and feeling.
In “The Broken Heart” there is so strong a sense of regret at love lost
that the “cynical” values of the other poems I am discussing begin to give
way to something else. It might be grouped with the libertine poems but
also, as I noted earlier, with poems of melancholy and mourning. It also at
moments comes close to the poems of meaningful love like “A Valediction
forbidding mourning,” which display a different set of values. The poem
shares aspects of all the thematic groupings I have constructed for the
purposes of this reading.55 But the speaker still inhabits a fallen world in
which love is declared an a priori impossibility:
He is stark mad, who ever sayes
That he hath beene in love an houre,
Yet not that love so soone decayes,
But that it can tenne in lesse space devour;
Who will beleeve mee, if I sweare
That I have had the plague a yeare?
Who would not laugh at mee, if I should say
I saw a flaske of powder burne a day?
But much stronger than in other poems referencing this world of “natural”
love, there is something else lurking within the cynicism and trying to
break through:
I brought a heart into the roome,
But from the roome, I carried none with mee;
If it had gone to thee, I know
Mine would have taught thine heart to show
More pitty unto mee: but Love, alas,
At one first blow did shiver it as glasse . . .
And now, as broken glasses show
A hundred lesser faces, so
My ragges of heart can like, wish, and adore,
But after one such love, can love no more.
In its metaphorical technique, the poem strives after unity much more
strongly than is the case for most of these unity-resisting allegorical poems.
There is one central image, that of the broken heart, that dominates the
last two stanzas and expresses the poem’s central theme. But the idea of
fragmentation, implicit so often in Donne, is made explicit in this poem
and so even here undercuts the striving for unity:
Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
Nor any place be empty quite,
Therefore I thinke my breast hath all
Those peeces still, though they be not unite.
Thematically, however, the poem narrates not only the shattering of the
speaker’s heart through a devastating, transformational, but unrequited
love, but also depicts the shattering of the natural world of love explored so
variously and with so many different affects in the subgroup of libertine
poems. In this one, the pilgrimage that the speaker of “Song” termed
“impossible” though “sweet” has been accomplished, not in finding a
constant beloved, but in the forging of a constant lover: “My ragges of
heart can like, wish, and adore, / But after one such love, can love no
more.” There is ambiguity in this last assertion – either the speaker can
love only the beloved, or, perhaps, cannot love at all again after the
devastation of the unrequited love. In either case, however, the attitudes
of “The Indifferent” or “Communitie” are far to seek. The libertine world
is in effect exploded in the poem. Of course, the world remains a fallen
world, its images available for allegorical transformation, as everywhere in
Donne’s poems. But a counterspace has been cleared within the poet’s
core, which is reduced not to nothing but to fragments ready for trans-
formations of a different kind than we saw in this first group of poems.
The new and still starkly modern strategy will be a depiction of a radical
new “private” within a world of an emptied “public.” 56
The Counter-Utopia of the Songs and Sonets

Even in the libertine poems I have been discussing, even in the consum-
mate sorrow of “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,” there can be found
fleeting glimpses of a different world of private love, or a yearning after it,
before it is overcome by “indifference” in the libertine poems or mourning
in “A Nocturnall.” But in the collection as a whole, we have to say, the
balance is quite different, as a result of the strong impact created by the next
group of poems I want to discuss, the group of poems of mutual love that
have gained Donne much of his fame. Because of them, the theme of
mourning of “A Nocturnall,” or of a society organized into an empty,
natural world in the libertine poems, is countered by these well-known
lyrics, whose overwhelming tone is paradoxically one of celebration, even
though the world invoked throughout the poetry is one of corruption and
decay. Donne’s greatest love poems, as has been often noted, constitute one
of early modernity’s most striking instances of the construction of a new
“private” within an emptied “public” domain, and it is a private domain of
passionate love and sexuality seen as the redeeming feature of a fallen world.
Like The Second Anniversarie, they create a utopian alternative in dialectical
response to the emptied world mourned earlier. But it is striking that in The
Songs and Sonets, the utopia is erotic rather than religious.57
Donne’s theme of an amorous utopia is not one that Benjamin was
drawn to in his critical writings – although he certainly pursued something
like it in the several love affairs of his private life, as biographers attest, and
as he intimates in a passage from his last work, “Theses on the Philosophy
of History.” There, in a passage I return to in the Conclusion, he muses
about the way our notions of human happiness are always bound by our
current historical context:
The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we
have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could
have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is
indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.58
It is clear in these sentences that erotic relations with women are a crucial
component of happiness for him, but that they are ranked more or less
equally with other friendships and are finally seen as harbingers of a
redemption to come. Benjamin’s ideas of utopia are secular versions of
religious themes from Judaism that he later saw paralleling the promises of
a future human liberation of Marxism. That is, Benjamin’s utopia is
something to come in a Messianic future, not something found in a private
space, as are Donne’s erotic utopias. Nevertheless, there are important
parallels between these two different concepts of utopia. Both point to a
profound absence in the lived experience of their respective sociohistoric
moments. For Benjamin modernity brought about a fragmented world and
a permanent crisis of meaning that art attempts (but always fails) to resolve
into unity. Donne confronts a similarly fragmented world and crisis of
meaning, and sees within the new structures of modernity the possibilities
of the consolations of love and eros – and also the possibilities of (modern)
art: “And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove, / We’ll build in Sonets pretty
roomes,” the speaker of “The Canonization” says of his two happy lovers,
coinventers of a new sexuality of meaning-giving and of a new art following
a parallel road. Each utopia reveals an experienced lack in the lifeworld and
attempts in its characteristic way to supply the want. Donne’s poetic
persona rejects a public world he found resistant to meaning and happiness
in favor of a meaningful private world. Benjamin seeks a final Messianic
justice in a world that has consistently been hostile to it.59
The poems of mutual love constitute Donne’s version of Baudelaire’s
“Ideale” poems in Les Fleurs du Mal, the dialectical negation and
codependent term of the “Spleen” poems just discussed. It is this quality
that, though seldom acknowledged as such, accounted for much of
Donne’s appeal to early twentieth-century Modernists and to many
feminists of several eras. He is in these poems a priest of love like
D. H. Lawrence. Even more remarkably for poetry from the early modern
period – and in distinction to Donne poems like “Aire and Angels” – these
poems by and large describe and analyze a mutually shared love between
essential equals within a patriarchal world: a love that was based not on
sexual difference but, as “The Extasie” explains, on the union of two equal
souls – even though bodily sexuality is an important part of the experience.
These are the poems that for me and many other readers constitute
Donne’s greatest achievement,60 and they rank (as Helen Gardner power-
fully argued) as the summit of love poetry in the English language – “The
Extasie,” the great Valediction poems, “Loves Growth,” “The Sunne
Rising,” “The Canonization,” “Loves Infiniteness” – it is hard to know
where to stop. These poems make use of the same dichotomy we saw in
“A Nocturnall,” but with the emphases reversed: the world’s fallen nature
declines into background, and the affirmation of private love takes center
stage.
These poems have also been central in the de-idealizing of Donne that
I alluded to in Chapter 1. One of the most influential of the tropes of new
historicism and cultural materialism was that of redefining the relation
between the personal and the political – and in a subset of influential
writings, beginning with Arthur Marotti’s “Love is not love” – of erotic
love and politics.61 The utopian realm of private love was recoded in the
works inspired by this trope as a kind of allegory Benjamin might have
recognized (he never defined it), as a disguise or mask over the realities of
social and political power. In a variation of this politicizing hermeneutic,
Achsah Guibbory instead defined the element of sexual politics in Donne
as the struggle for power between a man and a woman – and secondarily a
possible subtext in many of them of male resentment against a female
ruler. However, her focus is on the Elegies, and she acknowledges a
completely different dynamic in many of the Songs and Sonets, especially
the poems of mutual love.62
One reason for the tendency in some quarters to deprecate these
idealistic love poems is certainly because a powerful ideology of romantic
love functions in our contemporary society and has in the past and still can
entrap women (especially) into accepting subordination and narrow
domestication in their lives. Mass media are saturated with commercialized
fantasies of romantic love as the summit of human happiness, the pursuit
of life to the exclusion of all else, and so on. Think of all those romance
novels, romantic comedies in the movies, the role of romance on television
dramas, and the role it plays in the fantasies of millions. Do Donne’s
idealistic love poems work to reinforce these messages beyond whatever
roles they played in his own day? Many in recent years have thought so –
even though the poetry is too complex for mass media consumption, and a
critique of mass media “romance” should not be conflated with an argu-
ment “against love” tout court.63
Indeed, I want to pose another question to readers of this book. Is it
really necessary to explain that the experience of ecstatic sexual pleasure in
the context of a mutual and equal love relationship such as Donne depicts
in these poems constitutes one of life’s greatest and most valuable pleas-
ures? Is it not the case, as Achsah Guibbory asserts, that the Songs and
Sonets in fact are “celebrating sexual love as the most valuable experience of
life”? 64
Certainly the poems can work differently for different readers, but this
interpretation is a widely shared and prominent one and was an under-
stated but crucial component of the Modernist Donne. It deserves explicit
exploration in our times. Two critics with impeccable postmodernist and
pro-feminist records have already stepped forward to affirm a positive
judgment of sexual love as an important theme in Donne.
Richard Halpern, for example, went so far as to say, in a witty riposte to
what became a trope of new historicism after Marotti’s “Love is not
love,”65 that he thinks for the case of Donne, “love is love”:
Love, after all, is what “makes one little room an every where,” as Donne
puts it in “The Good Morrow.” It is for love or sexual passion that Donne
claims, in “The Canonization” and elsewhere, to sacrifice wealth and
worldly power. And finally, it is love that, at least occasionally in Donne’s
verse, provides a utopian realm of mutuality among persons, contrasting
with the litigiousness of civil society and the tyranny of the political
realm.66
Catherine Belsey is perhaps more cautious, but she too protests that the
early new historicist project of privileging the public and the political went
too far for the case of Donne especially, and needs some rethinking: “Part
of my project in writing about desire is to redress the balance a little. Not
to reverse it, not to invert the hierarchy, privileging the public over the
private, the political over the personal.”67 Achsah Guibbory strikes a
similar note. After acknowledging her debt to Marotti’s “Love is not
Love,” she adds, “But the feminist in me felt that something was missing,
that interpersonal relations between men and women needed to be put
back into the picture, rather than displaced by politics as it has traditionally
been understood.”68
Beyond this, both Belsey and Halperin see Donne’s idealistic erotic
poems as constituting milestones in the cultural history of the West,
marking one of the first moments, constitutive of postfeudal modernity,
of the elevation of the realm of the “private” to meaning-giving status
within individuals. Anthony Low, in his The Reinvention of Love, makes a
similar claim with emphasis on Donne as a particularly prescient definer of
a modern idea of love. Low writes: “Donne was a chief actor and influence
in what may be called the ‘reinvention of love,’ from something essentially
social and feudal to something essentially private and modern.”69 In the
case of Donne, there is not only the creation of a public-private split,
connected to the privatization of the economy in commodity capitalism,
such as Marx described in his “On the Jewish Question,” but the particular
valorization of erotic desire inherent in the Petrarchan tradition. I should
emphasize, however, that one of the unique features of Donne’s most
idealistic love poetry is his affirmation of sexual equality, his avoidance of
the kind of fetishizing abjectness of the lover before the beloved in the
earliest examples of the phenomenon in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch.
In these poems of Donne, a utopian private realm emerges within the
cleared space of a vacated “public” official world, emptied of value. This
utopia of course takes on the finally impossible task of fully compensating
for the melancholy of the world; it can only come near this at specific,
localized moments. But one of the defining tasks of the lyric poetry of
modernity is to construct such moments, and Donne’s poems in this
regard are one of the early triumphs of lyric modernity.70
“The Sunne Rising” is a very clear example of this kind of emphasis at
work. The sun as signifier of a natural world is in problematic interaction
with the world of humanity. It is itself an empty sign capable of meaning
anything. For the speaker, it is a marker of a quotidian, nonessential,
arbitrary human time (“the ragges of time”) that rules the outside world,
that beckons the subjected figures of the schoolboy and apprentice to labor
and the figures of the royal court to empty pastimes. But for lovers its
“reverend, and strong” beams are a trifle that can be negated with a wink:
“I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke, / But that I would not lose
her sight so long.” The conceits of the poem go on to develop this idea
with great brio, creating a counternatural utopian space of defiant univer-
salizing privacy:
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.
She’is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is:
Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique, all wealth alchimie . . .
Shine here to us, and thou art every where.
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy spheare.
As has often been noted in recent years, this climactic passage quite precisely
targets the public, political world for transvaluation. The summit of human
secular activity according to the world’s wisdom – that is, the realm of
politics that formed the network for the strivings after prestige, power, and
influence in a world that Donne had once seemed destined to enter and
shine in – is ridiculed as an empty signifier fit only to be contrasted scornfully
with the authentic erotic play of an amorous couple. The sun is enlisted into
the new world of hyperbolic absolute values as well, and the world is
transformed – or at least, the rapturous language leaves us ready to accept
this fiction, to revel in the ingenuity that transformed the world in a conceit.
In fact the Songs and Sonets are full of such moments and variations on
them, with various degrees of conviction and faith, not always as triumph-
ant as “The Sunne Rising,” but full of disdain for the world and displaying
a radical investment in erotic and spiritual love. One expression of this
theme is “A Valediction of weeping,” with its logic of trying to “top” itself
stanza by stanza in a series of related but expanding metaphoric conceits
comparing tears holding the image of the lover’s face, first to coins
(stamped with the sovereign’s image), then to a globe made into a spherical
map of the world, finally to the moon high above the earth. These are
classic instances of New Critical “Metaphysical conceits” (as discussed in
the next chapter). But they are also metaphors expressive of Benjamin’s
form of allegorical unity – comparisons that struggle toward a strained,
imperfect unity, which subject the reflecting tears, coins, globes, and the
moon to unlikely metaphoric work, with the poet like “a stern sultan in the
harem of objects,” forcing his will on the terms of the similitude, as
Benjamin put it for the case of the allegories of the German Trauerspiele.71
But the affect of “A Valediction of weeping,” despite its reference to cruelty
in its conclusion (“Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath / Who e’r
sighes most, is cruellest, and hasts the others death”), is ecstatic and
rapturous rather than cruel.72 Once more the lovers make up the whole
(authentic) world, the rest reduced to the status of mere signs for the
expression of their fullness.
Several of the greater poems explore this utopian “private” space created
in the new world of mutual, stable love, like “The good-morrow”:
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one . . ..
Where can we finde two better hemispheares,
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
The basic organizing allegory of the lovers themselves constituting a new
world opens up the relationship itself for a kind of exploration and utopian
projection. Benjamin, and even more explicitly his colleague and import-
ant intellectual partner Theodor Adorno (along with Ernst Bloch, whose
individual works perhaps lack the nuance of these other two) had empha-
sized the utopian mission of art and lyric poetry.73 It is important to note
that this shared theory of the utopian rejects the idea that the term
references escapism or the denial of social reality that many associate with
the general term. Rather, in this idea of utopia, the imagined space of
fulfillment serves a socially critical function by articulating social reality’s
denial of human needs and defining those needs for specific sociocultural
moments. Bloch’s favorite example was of the tales of an abundant land of
Cockaigne, overflowing with food, as the fantasy of societies vulnerable to
periodic famine.74 In Adorno’s terms, it is a “determined negation,” part of
a dialectical process of conceptualization.75 And of course the content of
utopia can be much more complex when we leave the realm of simple
biological need and enter the territory of the ideological or sociocultural –
as in Donne’s utopian works.
Benjamin, in his earlier The Origin of German Tragic Drama, had
defined the theme in terms of the dialectic, opposing meanings inherent
in baroque allegory. His notion of the allegory, it has been argued,
implicitly draws on Kabbalistic interpretive techniques for reading the
Torah allegorically. One level depicts divine history as an exile from
Paradise under the aegis of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But there is another level of meaning written under the aegis of the Tree of
Life, which shows the redemptory aspects of the same history, so that at
another level of interpretation there is an implicit promise of redemp-
tion.76 Since for the early Benjamin works of art share a similar participa-
tion in a language that retains traces of its divine origins even in its fallen
state (or of an “objectivity” based on the primal ideas’ collective, historical
origins, as Benjamin said when he was being more “materialist”), they too
are open to such double interpretation.
In The Songs and Sonets, these two moments of despair and redemption
are distributed somewhat differently, but they are a strong motif of the
collection as a whole. The dialectic is a secular dynamic depicting a fallen
world of inauthenticity redeemed by the discovery of a private world of
intimacy, mutuality, constancy, and bliss. Here Adorno’s posthumous
Aesthetic Theory from 1969 – a work that is in constant dialogue with the
ideas of Adorno’s lost partner Benjamin – can help define the structure of
Donne’s poetry in this regard. Adorno saw the art of modernity as carrying
on in a secular mode something of the utopian function that religion
played in premodernity and in aspects of postmodern society – creating
idealized versions of human life, providing ways of thinking about the
nonexisting with critical value in contemplating actually existing society.
Donne engages in this transformation throughout The Songs and Sonets.
Benjamin, with his religious sources, is engaged in a similar translation
of religious ideas into secular, aesthetic ones in his theory of allegory, but
he does not thematize this as Adorno did later. This reticence, as Rainer
Rochlitz suggested, may very well have come from his reluctance to reveal
the Judaic sources of many of his ideas in a German academy rife with
anti-Semitism.77 But the idea comes out clearly when Benjamin has
recourse to Christian imagery to communicate it (if I may repeat a passage
quoted in a previous chapter):
For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction, in which all earthly
things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon
allegorical contemplation, rather than its ideal quality. The bleak confusion
of Golgotha, which can be recognized as the schema underlying the
allegorical figure in hundreds of the engravings and descriptions of the
period, is not just a symbol of the desolation of human existence. In it
transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented, so much as, in its
own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection ...
And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects,
in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn
into allegories; and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which
they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully
rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea
of resurrection.78
Although as Donne aged his poetry reversed this quality, moving from eros
to religious devotion, he seems in this group of poems to be engaged
exactly in the kind of transportation of religious ideas into a secular
domain described by Adorno and Benjamin as aspects of the construction
of the modern idea of the aesthetic.79 In terms of the recent vogue for ideas
of political theology (see Chapter 1), we could speak of Donne as enacting
an erotic theology, using theological ideas to inscribe a secular erotic
universe. Donne is of course often discussed in terms of his appropriation
of religious imagery and concepts for the analysis and description of
human love and for his reversal of that trajectory in his religious verse.
However, this familiar topos of Donne studies can obscure the audacity on
display in the famous lines of “The Canonization” and elsewhere:
The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
The Phoenix, whose paradoxical method of reproduction was described by
Herodotus and Ovid, had long entered Christian iconography with many
meanings, but most prominently perhaps as a symbol of the resurrected
Christ and the resurrection of the body on the last day.80 Donne’s
comparison between the lovers and the Phoenix – one of the best known
in all of Donne because it was central to Cleanth Brooks’s defining New
Critical reading of “The Canonization” – has become familiar, with its
audacity blunted. But the imagery combines a somewhat hidden but
almost pornographic reference to the insertion of the penis into the vagina
(“So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit”) with an outrageous sexual pun
(famously based on the double meaning of “die” to mean both expire and
to have orgasm – which again equates sex and Christ’s resurrection (“We
dye and rise the same, and prove/ Mysterious by this love”). 81 It is, in
short, a powerful example of some of the properties of individual images
within the baroque drama that Benjamin discusses. He draws attention
particularly to baroque images that combine two dialectically opposed
meanings and crystallize an unstable relationship between them in a single,
but ambiguous image. “Dialectics at a standstill,” he later called the
structure of such images,82 and I will return to an examination of this idea
and its application to Donne in the next chapter. But here we should note
as well that the potentially heretical, blasphemous idea inherent in the
baroque image of the divine status of sexual love is reaffirmed in the
poem’s title and in the lines that give rise to the title:
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We’ll build in Sonets pretty roomes;
As well a well-wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us Canoniz’d for Love.
In this way, too, Donne engages an early modern prefiguration of the later
fully developed idea of the aesthetic (and its sexual subtexts) as taking on
the role that religion had formerly played.83
There is another instance of the same thing, and another baroque image,
pointed out years ago by the iconoclastic William Empson (and much
more circumspectly in the notes by Theodore Redpath) in which Donne
blasphemously annexes a religious meaning to his celebration of sexual love
in “The Relique.” Here the lovers’ bodies in the grave are compared to the
sacred remains of saints in a similar kind of transference. The opening
imagines a moment after his death, in which the speaker’s grave is opened
for another burial, “And he that digs it, spies / A bracelet of bright haire
about the bone, / Will he not let’us alone / And thinke that there a loving
couple lies.”
The wording and tone of this poem are bristling with unstated implica-
tions and mixed tone. Consider the very opening lines:
When my grave is broke up againe
Some second ghest to entertaine,
(For graves have learn’d that woman-head,
To be to more than one a Bed).
There is the flippant certainty of the idea of a violated tomb, then the
gallows humor of “ghest” and “entertaine” to describe the inhabitant and
function of the grave, and finally the arch and cynical reference to women’s
supposed inconstancy – all of which are immediately offset by the jubilant
language quoted above, the striking, dialectical image of the bracelet of
bright hair about the bone, the assertion of the lovers’ constancy, and the
defiance of death by the lovers’ will. It is a highly complex semantic field,
in which “high” and “low” perceptions vie with each other, undermine
each other, and intensify each other in a baroque chiaroscuro effect.
This is the context for this dense poem’s turn to religious controversy,
followed by a remarkable instance of the “transference” of the religious to
the secular discussed above:
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then, he that digges us up, will bring
Us, to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us Reliques; then
Thou shalt be’a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby.
The references to Catholicism in the term “mis-devotion”( cf. a similar
usage in The Second Anniversarie), the focus on relics, and more ambigu-
ously, the allusion to Bishop and King as judges of proper relics, all
perform complex functions.84 In the first instance, they enable the poems’
major allegorical “transference” by making possible the reference to a
practice suspect in post-Reformation England, a reverence for relics, the
remains or effects of sacred persons, most often saints. Second, they
provide a kind of cover for the audacity of the details of the transference
by associating them with misdevotion – in a poem in which they are
otherwise powerfully evoked. In fact, readers unconvinced by Donne’s
repudiation of Catholicism (scholars still argue about the degree to which
Donne could be said to have repudiated Catholicism generally, and we
can’t be sure at which stage in Donne’s complex religious evolution the
poem was written) might find confirmation of their skepticism. But
perhaps most important, it provides deniability for an implied comparison
that otherwise might be considered blasphemous: the identification of the
poem’s male speaker with Christ, and an implied affirmation of the idea
that Mary Magdalene was in a romantic relationship with him:85
Thou shalt be’a Mary Magdelen, and I
A something else thereby.
Once more sexual love is given the aura of divinity in a very complex,
indeterminate figural meaning. But it seems clear that love and the
representation of love in poetry have in this poem (and elsewhere in
Donne) become supreme values. This is hardly an orthodox position.
In the next chapter, I will focus on the formal qualities of the imagery of
“A Valediction forbidding Mourning” and “The Extasie.” Here, I want to
emphasize the baroque process of secularization involved in these and
other of Donne’s erotic and utopian poems. While the tone, the levels of
containing irony, and the themes differ significantly across these poems, as
is common in Donne, the often discussed use of theological concepts like
the two-fold nature of Christ implied in the poetry86 constitute another
example of the transference of religious ideas for secular use and a courting
of a charge of possible blasphemy that help make Donne not only an
uncommon Renaissance thinker but a figure whose poetry achieves
remarkable “legibility” (in Benjamin’s terms) in our own. Donne is a poet
who affirms the high value of human sexuality in the context of mutual
love and understanding, a rare poet in these utopian poems of a sexual
union between a man and a woman as equal agents in an equally shared
passion.
This is in fact a combination rarer in the archives of English poetry than
many assume. These qualities were – and still are – utopian in Benjamin’s
and Adorno’s sense – they describe human aspiration, potential and desire
rather than achieved accomplishment – and indeed, they are fleeting
moments within the great poetic variety of The Songs and Sonets and of
Donne’s oeuvre more generally. But the intensity they achieve is remark-
able and remains potent for our own world four hundred years or more
after their composition. Along with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, they
speak of a dream of linked gender equality and sexual pleasure still not
prevalent enough in the twenty-first century. And this linkage is an aspect
of the Marxian notion of utopia of which Frederic Jameson wrote, “From
any religious perspective ... the very idea of Utopia is sacrilegious (no
matter how many priests and secular religious are included); and it is
presumably the expression of a hubris whose historical and political form
is no doubt the belief in perfectibility itself.”87 Such aspirations remain
potentials, not inevitabilities, I hasten to repeat. But we need such remind-
ers of the possible in our age of lowered expectations and even cultural
despair. That is not the least reason to read and value Donne’s love poetry.
Notes
1 Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison and London: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1986; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008).
2 Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 135, quoted in Christopher Warley, Read-
ing Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 77.
3 See Helen Gardner, “Introduction,” in Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: The
Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), xvi–xxii for a
classic argument for this position.
4 See, for example, Marotti, John Donne, 135–51, for a difficult attempt to tie
several of the best-known poems of mutual love to specific moments in the
premarital courtship of Ann More by Donne. Late in the discussion, he does
acknowledge the possibility that the situation depicted in one poem may be
fictional (146–47).
5 Dayton Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 149–95.
6 Rebecca Ann Bach, “(Re)placing John Donne in the History of Sexuality,”
ELH 72.1 (spring 2005): 259–89.
7 For a variety of statements about the self-designating “Presentist” movement
in Shakespeare studies, see Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds., Presentist
Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007); Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady,
eds., Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now (New York: Palgrave, 2013); and
Evelyn Gajowski, ed., Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). There are of course many other
scholars pursuing a similar strategy in other literary fields across the discipline
who perform presentist readings without using the label.
8 For an allied but slightly different solution to these problems, based on
Adorno rather than Benjamin, see Christopher Warley, Reading Class through
Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 76–80.
9 See above, Chapter 1, n. 4, for citations of earlier treatments (including my
own) of Benjamin’s theory of allegory applied to early modern literature and
drawn on in this study.
10 See Andrea Mirabilo, “Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benja-
min in Paul de Man,” German Studies Review 35.2 (2013): 319–33; 322 for a
revealing analysis of de Man’s underacknowledged debts to Benjamin’s theory
of allegory and an astute discussion of important differences between the two.
13 Benjamin, Origin, 139–45 and throughout.
15 John Donne, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross
(Garden City, NY: Anchor 1967), 155. Subsequent quotations from The Songs
and Sonets are taken from the same source and will be identified by title in the
text or parenthetically.
16 Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, 232–35, believes the two are so closely linked
thematically and in their combination of idealism and satire that they were
most likely composed close to each other in time – that is, in the period
1610–12. However, other critics, including Walton, link the poem to the death
of Donne’s wife Ann in 1617. In short, the date of the poem is uncertain.
18 Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986); see Intro-
duction above for a discussion of this important work.
20 The division between the libertine and the mutual love poems has become
commonplace, though I have not found any critics creating a third small
group of mourning or melancholy as I do here. The bifold division of the love
poetry was already being discussed in the 1830s and 1840s, according to
Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century, 37, and it was classically
defined (as a difference between “Group I” and “Group II” poems) by Helen
Gardner, “General Introduction,” in Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and
Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), lvi–lvii. Gardner’s
argument sees the two groups as composed at different times, a conclusion
based on both thematic and stylistic distinctions and correlated with the idea
that his career-shattering marriage was a poetic turning point. While this is
plausible, it is far from certain, and I want to emphasize that, unlike Gardner,
I am amalgamating these poems solely on thematic grounds, and I include
among the libertine poems three (“Love’s Alchymie,” “The Primrose,” and
“The Dissolution”) that she assigns to Group II. Among others, Ronald
Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 87–106, also divides the erotic
poems this way.
21 There are of course a number of borderline cases, but the central ones that I include
in this category are “The Flea,” “Love’s Alchymie,” “Song (Go and catch),”
“The Indifferent,” “The Apparition,” “Womans Constancy,” “Loves Usury,”
“Communitie,” “The Curse,” “The Message,” “Loves Deity,” “The Damp,”
“Confined Love,” “The Primrose,” “A Jeat Ring Sent,” and “The Prohibition.”
23 Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kulterreller Selbstverstän-
dlichkeiten in den Wissenschften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich:
C. Hanser, 1976).
24 Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals,
Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51.
25 Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Erotology of Donne’s ‘Extasie’ and the Secret
History of Voluptuous Rationalism,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900,
44. 1 (winter 2004): 121–47, mentions a similar neolibertine “nature” defended
in the Biathanatos, p. 129.
27 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New
York: Seabury, 1977), 3.
28 I discuss these instrumental approaches to politics at length in Hugh Grady,
Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from “Richard
II” to “Hamlet” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26–57 and
throughout.
29 Helen Gardner, ed., The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, included this
poem in her list of Dubia (poems not conclusively by Donne), and John W.
Milgate, ed., The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters of John Donne (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967), also excluded it, but other editors include it
among his works.
30 John Donne, “23: Elegie: Variety,” in Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of
John Donne, 73–75, 37–50.
31 This poem is also quoted to illustrate the theme of natural libertinage in
Donne’s erotic poetry in Louis I. Bredvold, “The Naturalism of Donne in
Relation to Some Renaissance Traditions,” Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 22.4 (1923), 471–502; 475. I return to this essay below.
32 Theodore Redpath devotes an appendix to these issues in John Donne, The
Songs and Sonets of John Donne, ed. Theodore Redpath (London: Methuen,
1956; reprint 1967), appendix IV: Farewell to Love, ll. 23–30, 145–49, on which
I have partially drawn here.
33 Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 104.
34 Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 105.
37 Bredvold, “The Naturalism of Donne in Relation to Some Renaissance
Traditions,” 474–77.
38 Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke, eds. Seventeenth-Century
Prose and Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Harbrace, 1963), 735. I discussed their
view briefly in Chapter 1.
39 In an article devoted primarily to the use of the word “nature” in King Lear,
the Donne biographer R. C. Bald mentions in a digression that Donne seems
to employ in his libertine poems the same naturalistic philosophy expounded
by Edmund in his “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” speech. Crediting the first
observation of this theme in Donne to Bredvold, he argues that in Donne’s
case the use of the pernicious doctrine is “limited” since “he invokes it
primarily as a justification for sexual freedom” (343), whereas for Edmund it
is a subversive doctrine of social inversion; see R. C. Bald, “Edmund and
Renaissance Free-Thought,” Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies, ed.
James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby (Wash-
ington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 337–49.
40 Robert Ornstein, “Donne, Montaigne, and Natural Law,” Journal of English
and Germanic Philology 55.2 (1956): 213–29.
43 For example, see Shankar Raman, “Can’t Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and
Colonialism in Donne’s Erotic Verse,” Criticism 43.2 (spring 2001): 135–68, for
a persuasive look at Donne’s interest in and use of changing notions of
economic value as metaphors of desire and love in the elegy “Loves Progress.”
44 Some important works include Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Meta-
morphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1986); Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993);
Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and
Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession:
Ovid, Spenser, Counter Nationhood (Toronto: Toronto University Press,
1997); Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Cora Fox, Ovid and the
Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009); and Heather James, “Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early
Modern England,” ELH 70 (2003): 343–73.
45 Donald Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist: Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in
“The Songs and Sonets” (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), is the
locus classicus for this position, although his attempts to label Donne as both a
Petrarchist and a Neoplatonist depend on finding strains of these that are in
effect anti-Petrarchan and anti-Neoplatonist. More viable and interesting are
the discussions of how Ovidian and Petrarchan discourses war against each
other in several of Donne’s poems in Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in
Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1997), 59–74, and in Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrar-
chism and Its Counter-Discourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995),
203–48, who sees a complex use of the Petrarchan tradition by Donne that is
neither a rejection nor an appropriation.
46 See Barbara Correll, “Terms of ‘Indearment’: Lyric and General Economy in
Shakespeare and Donne,” ELH 75 (2008): 241–62, for an excellent exploration
of the connection, particularly between love and commerce.
47 One such example is Roma Gill, “Musa locusa Mea: Thoughts on the Elegies,”
in A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: Essays in Criticism (London: Methuen, 1972),
47–72.
48 See, for example, from many possibilities, Alan Armstrong, “The Apprentice-
ship of John Donne: Ovid and the Elegies,” ELH 44.3 (1977): 419–42.
49 Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in
Late Elizabethan England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 153.
Emphasis in the original.
51 Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (A.D. 397–401), trans. J. G. Pilk-
ington (Norwalk, CT: Easton, 1979), 134.
52 Corthell, Ideology and Desire, 65.
53 The sense of disdain and disgust is powerfully captured by Achsah Guibbory,
“‘Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So’: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies” (1990);
revised and reprinted in her Returning to John Donne (Farnham: Ashgate,
2015), 87–106.
54 Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
55 Marotti, John Donne, in fact, groups this lyric with a set of seven poems he
thinks were written about and probably for Ann Donne before their marriage,
thus seeing it as a poem of mutual love rather than of libertinage (137). While it
has elements of both melancholy and mutual love, I think it shares with the
other libertine poems a notion of an amoral world of sexual longing.
56 Anthony Low, The Reinvention of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), is particularly articulate on this point; see 3–4 and 31–86.
57 I am arguing like Richard Halpern, “The Lyric in the Field of Information:
Autopoiesis and History in Donne’s “Songs and Sonnets,” Yale Journal of
Criticism 6.1 (Jan. 1, 1993): 185–215, that in the Songs and Sonets love is love first
and foremost. But recently several critics have influentially claimed that
sacramental and incarnational parallels are at work in many of Donne’s erotic
transformations like this one, adding another level of complexity to their
possible meanings. See particularly Thomas M. Hester, “‘this cannot be said’:
A Preface to the Reader of Donne’s Lyrics,” Christianity and Literature 39
(1990): 365–85; Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred
and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999);
Achsah Guibbory, “Donne, Milton, and Holy Sex” (1995), reprinted in her
Returning to John Donne (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 107–24; and Kimberly
Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), discussed in Chapter 1.
58 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benja-
min, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken, 1969), 254.
59 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 110–58, and Alexander
Gelley, Benjamin’s Passages: Dreaming, Awakening (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2015), 147–95, for insightful gatherings together and discussions
of many of Benjamin’s ideas about the utopian, from somewhat opposing
viewpoints.
60 This was certainly Grierson’s view: “The justification of natural love as
fullness of joy and life is the deepest thought in Donne’s love-poems, far
deeper and sincerer than the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and identify
of souls with which he plays in some of the verses addressed to Mrs. Herbert”
(Grierson, “Introduction,” 2: xlvi).
61 Arthur M. Marotti, “‘Love is not love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the
Social Order,” ELH 49 (1982): 396–428.
62 Achsah Guibbory, “‘Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So,’” 89.
63 Even in Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Pantheon, 2003),
love is praised and longed for. It is the potential boredom of long-term
monogamy that is Kipnis’s target, and the solution she proposes (and the
possible problems raised) shares many similarities with those of Donne’s
libertine poems.
64 Achsah Guibbory, “‘The Relique,’ The Song of Songs, and Donne’s Songs and
Sonets,” 134.
65 That article, it should be pointed out, did not feature Donne’s poetry but
concentrated on the Elizabethan sonnet cycles, especially Sidney’s and Shake-
speare’s. Some have claimed that Marotti in effect extended the article’s thesis
to Donne in John Donne, Coterie Poet, and there are moments in that book
that are similar. However, a full reading will show that Marotti is far from
negating love as a favored theme of Donne’s.
66 Halpern, “The Lyric in the Field of Information,” 192–93.
67 Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994), 6.
68 Achsah Guibbory, “Part II: Love,” Returning to John Donne (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2015), 60.
69 Low, The Reinvention of Love, 33.
70 In addition to Belsey, Halperin, and Low, see Corthell for discussions of this
issue within a Postmodernist critical framework.
72 Empson’s idea, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd ed. (New York: New Direc-
tions, n.d.), 139–45, that the poem suggests the future infidelity of the
addressed beloved, seems to me questionable.
73 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiede-
mann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 233–34 and throughout. Adorno was adopting and adapting a key
concept from Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen
Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), trans. of Das
Prinzip Hoffnung, 1954–59. See also Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art
and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
I summarized and applied the concept to As You Like It in Hugh Grady,
Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1996), 191–212.
74 Ernst Bloch, The Philosophy of the Future; excerpted in Maynard Solomon, ed.,
Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (New York: Vintage, 1974),
578–82; 579.
75 Adorno uses this term in a moderated dialogue with Ernst Bloch, “Some-
thing’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno
on the Contradictions of Utopian Learning,” Ernst Bloch, The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank
Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 1–17; 10–13.
76 Richard Wolin, “An Aesthetic of Redemption: Benjamin’s Path to the Trauer-
spiel,” Telos 43 (spring 1980): 61–90; 67–68. Much of this material was later
incorporated into Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetics of Redemp-
tion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
77 Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benja-
min, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 33–36.
79 Cf. Corthell, Ideology and Desire, 88–100.
80 An early Church Father, Clement I, wrote of the many signs within the
natural world of Christian mysteries, especially of the resurrection of the
body: “Let us consider that wonderful sign [of the resurrection] which takes
place in Eastern lands, that is, in Arabia and the countries round about. There
is a certain bird which is called a phoenix. This is the only one of its kind, and
lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that
it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices,
into which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays
a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of
the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength,
it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing
these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis.
And, in open day, flying in the sight of all men, it places them on the altar
of the sun, and having done this, hastens back to its former abode. The
priests then inspect the registers of the dates, and find that it has returned
exactly as the five hundredth year was completed”; First Clement: Clement of
Rome, Early Christian Writings (www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/1clem
ent-roberts.html).
81 See Corthell, Ideology and Desire, 90–95, for an alternative reading of the
“we two being one are it” phrase as a reference to bisexuality and the figure
of the hermaphrodite – and much else of interest.
82 “[The] image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill”
(Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
1999); Convulute N (“On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”),
N3, 1, 462. Chap. 1). See, Chapter 4, for a discussion of the relation of the
image in the baroque to his later and related concept, the “dialectical image.”
83 Cf. Halperin, “The Lyric in the Field of Information,” 192, for a similar point;
see Warley, Reading Class, 90–95, for arguments that Adorno’s ideas of
modern art illuminate the poem; and Corthell, Ideology and Desire, 97:
“The canonization envisioned here is mainly literary.” Corthell makes his
argument for the ability of art to negate ideology through the terms of Julia
Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, but they are broadly similar to the
function of the utopian in Benjamin and related theory.
84 Corthell, Ideology and Desire, 95–96, envisions a “recusant” strain in Donne’s
poetic subjectivity in several lyrics, and especially “The Canonization.” It
performs a psychological, rather than politico-religious function, however,
he argues. Low, The Reinvention of Love, 54–56, sees a carnivalesque inversion
in the elevation of the lovers’ bones, seeing the implied figure of Christ and the
explicit one of Mary Magdalen as King and Queen of the carnival, in a
transformation of an old communal ethos to a new utopian privacy.
85 William Empson and Theodore Redpath both read the lines this way. Empson
argued for the position against the objections of Helen Gardner; for particu-
lars, see John Haffenden, “Introduction,” in William Empson, Essays on Renais-
sance Literature: vol. 1: Donne and the New Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 13–16. Redpath takes a similar view in more moderate
language, in Redpath, ed., The Songs and Sonets of John Donne (London:
Methuen, 1956), 109–10, n. to l. 18.
86 The classic account of the use of this idea for secular (in this case political)
purposes is Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1957), 24–41. See also Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh:
Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 1–33 and throughout for a different but also
secularizing account of sacred imagery used for secular, aesthetic purposes.
87 Frederic Jameson, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 191.
4
Allegorical Objects and Metaphysical Conceits

Thinking about Donne’s Tropes with Benjamin
At one level of analysis, Donne’s Songs and Sonets presents itself to us as a

world of objects. His poetry, as Judith Herz put it, has “things in its
words.”1 There are poems that take their titles and much of their thematic
focus from objects – a jet ring, a blossom, a bracelet – and others in which
objects are paired with unlikely partners to create unusual metaphors
or similes that became known – anachronistically, as we will see – as
Metaphysical conceits. Among these are perhaps the most famous of all of
Donne’s poetic tropes: the “stiff twin compasses,” the eyes connected by
strings, the Phoenix and its riddle, the sheet of beaten gold, and so on.
They seem very much to verify for the case of Donne what Walter
Benjamin wrote of the world of baroque allegory generally: “Any person,
any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”2 These are
not just objects that connect literary texts to the material world, as we have
heard so often from recent new materialist critics. Rather, they are in
meaningful ways allegorical objects that signify complex human relations
and internal subjective states. Donne’s famous Metaphysical conceits can
be described as well as allegorical objects in the sense that Benjamin
discusses in his Trauerspielbuch. In what follows, I want to extend the
discussion into a look at the issue of the relation between some of Donne’s
best-known poetic tropes and the idea of the baroque allegory at closer,
more finely focused levels.
I attempted to demonstrate in the previous chapters the affinity of
Benjamin’s theory of the baroque allegory with Donne’s The Anniversaries
(the work of Donne that seems to me most directly and obviously
evocative of Benjaminian ideas) and – more indirectly, but with meaning-
ful affinities as well – The Songs and Sonets. Most important, the poetry in
both forms avoids Romantic unity in favor of a strategy of fragmentation.
Both present visions of an empty, melancholic world – but also the
possibility of the transformation or redemption of that world through
utopian visions, whether through the evocation of heaven in The
137
Anniversaries or the heaven on earth of erotic fulfillment in certain of The
Songs and Sonets. Both are involved in the production of modern modes of
thinking, presenting prescient ideas of the autonomy of the aesthetic and
the autonomy of private subjectivity.
We should recall that Benjamin’s theory of the allegory followed from
his idea of the emptying out of (premodern) meaning in the world
generally, productive of a world of objects open to allegorical resignifica-
tion as “anything else.” “If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of
melancholy,” Benjamin writes, “if melancholy causes life to flow out of it
and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the
allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite
incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such
significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist.”3
This allegorical vision encompasses traditional extended metaphors, and
intuitively it sounds close to Donne’s way with metaphors and similes.
We need to ask how such a perception would impact the received idea of
“the Metaphysical conceit.” Is there a way in which these celebrated tropes
can be thought of in Benjaminian terms as baroque images and/or frag-
mented allegories such as he identifies in the German plays he discusses? As
I have already suggested, I think the answer is yes, with a few caveats and
some complications along the way. In a Benjaminian context, many of
Donne’s Metaphysical conceits can be seen as fragmented allegories and/or
baroque images expressive of an overall allegorical vision.
The term “conceit,” whose history I will consider briefly below, has been
analyzed most often through close reading, as a singular poetic trope con-
nected to the (problematical or not) unity of a larger lyric poem. I will focus
on the “close-reading” level of the conceit in this chapter as a way of getting at
what has been the most familiar way of approaching this issue. But there is
also a small literature on the larger implications of the conceit, which has
investigated the question of a metaphysics of the conceit. While these are
theoretically related, in practice they have been separate issues, and I will deal
with them separately. The issue of the individual conceit is a complicated
enough discussion in its own right. But in Chapter 5, the issue of a possible
metaphysics of the conceit will be taken up in the context of a Benjaminian
view of the situation of baroque poetics in the seventeenth century.
What Was a Metaphysical Conceit?

The first step in a rethinking of the Metaphysical conceit is to realize how
relatively recent the term actually is as a descriptor of Metaphysical
Thinking about Donne’s Tropes with Benjamin 139
poetry.4 The use of the phrase in association with Metaphysical poetry is
essentially a creation of the twentieth century. One typical example, from a
1974 standard literary reference book, takes two steps to arrive at that exact
phrase but otherwise can serve for a much larger number of similar
definitions in books, articles, and textbooks. A conceit is, it states,
“an intricate or far-fetched metaphor, which functions through arousing
feelings of surprise, shock, or amusement.” After establishing this general
meaning of “conceit” (and note that it specifies that the conceit is a type of
metaphor), the entry goes on to distinguish the “metaphysical” conceit
from the Petrarchan, with the former showing “the spiritual qualities or
functions of the described entity [as] presented by means of a vehicle
which shares no physical features with the entity.” Finally, the conceit is
defended from Johnson’s strictures (discussed in Chapter 1) through the
claim that the metaphysical conceit “serves not as an ornament, but as an
instrument of vision.”5
The definition serves my purposes here because it well illustrates that
the term – at least as applied to the poetry of Donne and his followers – is a
hybrid combination of one word that (in this sense and context) had been
coined by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century (“metaphysical”)6
with another that was an extant word in Donne’s lifetime (“conceit”) –
though not usually specifically meaning a form of the metaphor, as will be
further discussed below. To be sure, Johnson refers to conceits in his essay
as well, but without the qualifier “Metaphysical.”7 “Conceit” is used
technically and neutrally by Johnson in passages such as the following
remarks on the Metaphysical poets generally: “If they frequently threw
away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out
unexpected truth; if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth
the carriage.”8 He referred to what came to be called a Metaphysical
conceit rather as “a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar
images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.”9
While in the twentieth century it became generally established (as in
The Princeton Encyclopedia definition) that a conceit is a kind of metaphor,
in Donne’s lifetime the word had a broader range of meaning. One sense
of “conceit” (among several others circulating simultaneously in the six-
teenth century) was “a fanciful, ingenious, or witty notion or expression,”10
with positive examples of this usage in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, neutral or pejorative ones in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
Oddly, no uses of the term in reference to poetry are cited in the OED,
though every student of Donne knows the famous thumbnail sketch of
him by his friend Sir Richard Baker, calling him “a great visiter of Ladies,
a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses.”11 But in
this context, the last phrase should probably be construed as meaning
something like “verses full of ingenious conceptions,” rather than “verses
full of specialized metaphors.”
To explore these issues of changing meanings beyond what is given in
The Oxford English Dictionary, I tried to follow the method of “thin
description” advocated by Douglas Bruster as a tool of early modern
scholarship12 and searched Early English Books Online (EEBO) and
full-text Google Books online to discover when the term “metaphysical
conceit” began commonly to be used. The EEBO search (the database
goes only to 1700) found six occurrences of the phrase (including spelling
variants) by such notables as John Hales of Eton (1584–1656), Thomas
Morton (1564–1659), Thomas Paybody (b. 1597 or 1598), and Anthony
Wotton. All of them use the term in a philosophical rather than literary
context, as in Hales’s remark distinguishing the sense of the word “good-
ness” he is using from “that Metaphysical conceit which we dispute of in our
Schools.”13
A computer search for occurrences of the two words together in Google
Books between 1800 and 2000 was very instructive, showing that the
phrase occurred with modest ups and downs at a relatively low rate
between 1800 and 1920. Thereafter, the popularity of the term shot up,
peaking in 1958, but beginning a definite downslope after 1980, until by
2000 it had reached the level of its highest rates of occurrence in the early
nineteenth century, far below their twentieth-century peak.
A closer look at the actual nineteenth-century occurrences of the phrase
revealed, however, that it had not yet in that period become strictly
associated with “Metaphysical poetry.” A magazine article from 1833, for
example, contained the following use of the term: “That the mind never
rests from its labours, is a metaphysical conceit, unsustained by adequate
authority.”14 Many of the other occurrences were similarly simply pejora-
tive references to things the authors considered too complicated in literary
style or otherwise – one reference was to architecture.
Two uses came closer to the later meaning of the term as a specific
reference to early modern poetry, and both occurred relatively early in the
Victorian period. Referring to the history of the sonnet form in England,
for example, Henry Kittle White complained that the earliest developers of
the sonnet in England (he presumably means Wyatt and Surrey) had a
reductive view of its possibilities: “A sonnet, with them, was only another
word for some metaphysical conceit, or clumsy antithesis, contained in
fourteen harsh lines, full of obscure inversions and ill-managed
expletives.”15 But a rare, perhaps unique, specific linkage in this period
between Donne and the term was provided by William Hazlitt in his
1818–19 lectures on the English comic writers (from which I quoted in
Chapter 1). After praising the opening of Donne’s “The Blossome,” he
complains, “This simple and delicate description is only introduced as a
foundation for an elaborate metaphysical conceit as a parallel to it, in the
next stanza.”16 The phrase was obviously still pejorative, but it is definitely
associated with Donne. The context makes clear that he had been reading
Samuel Johnson on the Metaphysical poets, and perhaps he deserves the
credit of joining together words that Johnson used separately and in effect
establishing a precedent for a term that would eventually become ubiqui-
tous to describe a specific kind of metaphor used by Donne and followers.
When the changeover of the term from pejorative to favorable occurs is
difficult to pinpoint with the tools available. Clearly the change is linked
with the general elevation of Donne’s literary reputation, which, as we saw,
Haskin traces as a complex cultural process taking place slowly and
unevenly over the nineteenth century and culminating in the 1890s17 –
before, however, reaching a new level in the 1920s in the formation of what
I have termed the Modernist Donne.
But whether it is the first to use the term positively, the lengthy
introduction to Grierson’s 1912 edition of Donne’s poetry was a milestone
in the process. There seems to be still some pejorative residue to his use of
the phrase “metaphysical conceit,” when he writes in trying to compare
and contrast Donne and Ovid, “But if the difference between Donne’s
metaphysical conceits and Ovid’s naturalness and simplicity is palpable, it
is not less clear that the emotions which they express, with some important
exceptions . . . are identical.”18 Over the course of his defense of Donne as
an emotionally powerful, expressive, and eloquent poet, a new context
forms that begins to rob the phrase of its pejorative qualities. It becomes a
descriptive term rather than a pejorative one and appears as such subse-
quently in analyses of Donne by influential critics such as Empson,
Brooks, and Leavis.
Eliot, in contrast, downplays the importance of “conceits,” even those
“sometimes considered characteristically ‘metaphysical,’” in trying to get at
the defining quality of Metaphysical poetry, focusing instead on the famous
“unification of sensibility” as the crucial idea for his readers in 1921.19 But as
the Google search shows, the term skyrocketed in popularity along with
Donne’s poetry a few years after Eliot’s essay, from the mid-1920s on.
In Helen Gardner’s introduction to her influential anthology The
Metaphysical Poets, in contrast to Eliot, the “conceit” is said to be
Metaphysical poetry’s “most immediately striking feature,” one of its two
most important characteristics,20 and she goes on to defend Metaphysical
conceits against some historically important charges against them – that,
for example, they merely exist, as Johnson complained, to show off their
authors’ erudition or that they are more striking for their ingenuity than
their justness.21 The figure is further praised in terms, as we saw earlier,
that are quite Benjaminian in their tenor: “Here a conceit is like a spark
made by striking two stones together. After the flash the stones are just two
stones. Metaphysical poetry abounds in such flashes.”22
In short, the phrase “Metaphysical conceit” is part of Donne’s extensive
afterlife rather than a phrase used in connection with him by his contem-
poraries. To be sure, “conceit” was a word used by his contemporaries, but
it was most often used in its sense of the intellectual faculty or as a
synonym of our word “concept.” In the cases in which it referred to
poetry, it was not a term restricted (as it tended to be later) to a specific
kind of metaphor. Rather, a conceit could take many trope-like forms; it
referred most often to the general quality of intellectual ingenuity
embodied in the specific instance rather than to some poetic trope in a
narrow sense.23 Note, for example, the usage in the commendatory poem
to his late father Sir John Beaumont, Knight and Baronet, by his son and
heir of the same name and title:
If Knowledge shall be mention’d, or the Arts,
Soone will be reckon vp thy better parts:
At naming of the Muses, he will streight
Tell of thy Workes, where sharpe and high conceit,
Cloath’d in sweet Verse, giue thee immortall Fame.24
Here it is doubtful that “conceit” refers to a trope at all; rather, the idea
seems to be a tribute to the combination of high thought in “sweete Verse.”
The same might be said of another use of “conceit” in connection to
poetry by George Gascoigne: “As thus, he vvhich wold haue good morall
lessons clerkly handled, let him smell to the Tragedie translated out of
Euripides. He that wold laugh at a prety conceit closely conueyed, let him
peruse the comedie translated out of Ariosto.”25 This last, however, seems
to use the term in the sense (noted in the OED) of a “device,” a complex
but entertaining thought process, as seen in Ariosto’s comedies. Here, at
least, we are approaching the idea of poetic tropes, but the term seems to
be more general. These examples of Renaissance usage show how far
Donne’s contemporaries were from using “conceit” as it was in the heyday
of the Modernist Donne, as a special kind of metaphor.26 It is consistently
used in more generalized senses.27 And in recent years the term has become
rare in Donne studies.
Gracián’s and Tesauro’s Treatises on Wit

A similar usage can be found in one of the most fully developed of several
seventeenth-century Continental treatises on wit that use cognates of the
English “conceit” (the Spanish concepto or the Italian concetto28), Baltasar
Gracián’s Agudeza y el arte de ingenio (1642; revised and expanded 1649).29
I will return to this work in Chapter 5 in a different context, but here
I want to use it in support of the idea that the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries had a distinctly broader idea of the conceit than that which is
current among early modern scholars. To begin with, Gracián explicitly
states that the art of wit (arte de ingenio) is on a different plane from the art
of rhetoric and that it is manifested through any number of rhetorical
tropes, not just metaphors: “The tropes and rhetorical figures are the
matter and foundation over which wit raises up its artfulness, and what
for rhetoric is form, this our art takes for the material on which the enamel
of its artifice is fused,” he wrote.30 He does, like his fellow Jesuit theorist of
wit Emanuele Tesauro, see the detection of similarities as a basic compon-
ent of forming conceptos (conceits), but he also allows for conceits based on
opposites, not similarities.31 That is one reason he most often describes the
conceit as based on a “concordance” (concordancia) or a “harmonious
correlation” (una armónica correlación ) rather than as a similarity. He
defines the conceit (concepto) as “an act of the understanding, that
expresses the correspondence that is found between objects,”32 again using
a word that is broader than similarity. He argues that the wit consists in the
artificiosa (the term includes senses of the English words “artistic, skillful,
subtle, creative, inventive”33) involved in finding and expressing an unex-
pected and witty correspondence between these objects – which might be
concrete or abstract, a similarity or an opposition. His treatise is a com-
pendium of all the different rhetorical forms that wit can take, and the
metaphor or simile is only one among dozens.34
By way of contrast, the Italian Emanuele Tesauro, drawing on Aristo-
tle’s claims in the Poetics about the centrality of the metaphor among
poetic figures, attempts to organize his equally extensive inventory of the
types of wit around an expanded conception of the metaphor.35 However,
wit takes so many forms that the term is stretched considerably, and his
work, too, supports the idea that the art of wit and its conceits takes many
more forms than that rather narrow one defined in the twentieth century
as the Metaphysical conceit.36 For example, the witty metaphor itself is
divided by Tesauro into eight subdivisions, including hyperbole, hypoth-
esis, equivocation, opposites, and so on.37 I should note too that, unlike
Gracián, Tesauro sees his work to be a development of the received art of
rhetoric, as his “table of materials” makes clear.38
Benjamin’s Allegory and the Metaphysical Conceit

Similar in this way to the Renaissance usages of “conceit,” Benjamin does
not think of the allegory as a specific figure of speech. The two terms
(conceit and allegory) do not show a one-to-one correspondence of mean-
ing, however; neither is there some specific set of directions for reading
Donne allegorically. Rather, Benjamin speaks of “the allegorical way of
seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the
World.”39 In another passage he speaks of “the allegorical mode of expres-
sion”40 and also points out that:
The exuberant subjection of antique elements in a structure . . . is the
purpose of the technique [of allegory] which applies itself separately, and
ostentatiously, to realia, rhetorical figures and rules.41
That is to say, it is the allegorical vision overall, not the use of a specific
technique like a certain form of metaphor (extended or not), that is the
essence of the allegory for Benjamin – and this is key to understanding the
idea that what had been called a Metaphysical conceit can be thought of as a
kind of fragmented allegory in Benjamin’s sense. For Benjamin, allegory
expresses itself in a variety of different tropes (“rhetorical figures”), and what
has come to be called the conceit might be thought of as one of them.42
The Baroque Image and the Conceit

That said, it is also the case that Benjamin, both in the Trauerspielbuch and
in The Arcades Project, devotes considerable attention to images and the
single image, and his analysis of specific baroque images is relevant to
thinking about the Metaphysical conceit (and Donne’s imagery more
generally) in The Songs and Sonets and elsewhere.
In his work on the seventeenth century baroque he alludes more than
once to the image within the baroque drama as a figure with certain
distinct properties. One of the most important is the way this image
contains conflicting meanings that are dialectical opposites without
mediation: “the baroque apotheosis is a dialectical one. It is accomplished
in the movement between extremes,” he writes.43 The image in “the field
of allegorical intuition,” Benjamin notes in a critical passage I have quoted
here more than once, “is a fragment, a rune.”44 But it is one whose very
essence involves it in dialectical contradictions: “Considered in allegorical
terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued. This reli-
gious dialectic of content has its formal correlative in the dialectic of
convention and expression. For allegory is both: convention and expres-
sion; and both are inherently contradictory.”45
Benjamin sees connections between this baroque aesthetic and the
practice of the many emblem books of his era in Germany and elsewhere
that he studied in some detail. He is particularly fascinated by the way
certain writers connected the visual emblems with an esoteric theory of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, which held that the ideograms of the Egyptians
represented the primordial ideas that had since been corrupted in existing
languages.46 This idea that the visual communicated in a more direct way
than words, in Benjamin’s view, influenced the production of emblem
books in the baroque era.47 But these had a direct allegorical structure in
that each of the three elements of the emblem – the visual image, the
motto or short description, and the poem of commentary – referenced the
other but also differed from it and was a kind of allegorical “substitution”
(a term I will discuss further below) rather than a unified symbol of
singular meaning.
The baroque image to which Benjamin alludes a number of times shares
this quality of plurisignificance and the use of visual images: in the
baroque, he writes, “the written word tends towards the visual,” whether
in the “use of highly charged metaphors” or in the “extreme character of
the typographical arrangement”48 – of the sort that George Herbert (who,
like Donne, is never mentioned by Benjamin) would famously develop in
lyrics like “Easter Wings.”
Earlier theorists of the allegory, Benjamin reports, saw this ambiguity as a
weakness of the allegorical form, as in this passage from a 1912 scholarly study:
The basic characteristic of allegory, however, is ambiguity, multiplicity of
meaning; allegory, and the baroque, glory in richness of meaning. But the
richness of this ambiguity is the richness of extravagance; nature, however,
according to the old rules of metaphysics, and indeed, also of mechanics is
bound by the law of economy. Ambiguity is therefore always the opposite
of clarity and unity of meaning.49
While no one who has been influenced by the classical critical notions of
the old New Criticism (let alone deconstruction) will be impressed by
these judgments, they were part of the received tradition that Benjamin
was combatting in trying to distance the concept of allegory from the
disrepute it had long been associated with, and not only in Germany. But
clearly he was taken with the recognition of the “multiplicity of meaning”
pointed out by Cohen within the structure of the baroque allegory.
As Rainer Nägele points out in an important article, Benjamin was here
exploring ideas about dialectics that were important not only for under-
standing the workings of baroque images, but also for his broader under-
standing of the dialectical method itself. Nägele argues that Benjamin was
developing what proved to be his basic difference from Adorno’s version of
Critical Theory in a refusal to countenance, at least in this context, a
Hegelian notion of “mediation,” of concepts that at least partially synthe-
sized dialectical contradictions. Instead, Benjamin preferred to keep the
contradiction in play, to emphasize the “extremes” of a contradiction
rather than attempt to mediate between them.50 He continued and
developed this idea in his now celebrated phrase (mentioned in the
previous chapter) “dialectics at a standstill.”51 But he first discovers this
way of looking at dialectical extremes in his early work on allegory. We see
it in the following passage from The Origin:
The Emblemata selectiora . . . contains a plate which shows a rose simultan-
eously half in bloom and half faded, and the sun rising and setting in the
same landscape. “The essence of the baroque lies in the simultaneity of its
actions,” writes Hausenstein rather crudely, but with some awareness. For
where it is a question of a realization in terms of space – and what else is
meant by its secularization other than its transformation into the strictly
present – then the most radical procedure is to make events simultaneous.52
He goes on to make a point about how this worked on the baroque stage
with its scenery and complicated plots, but he thinks these are related to
allegory: “The meaning of its action is expressed in a complicated configur-
ation like letters in a monogram.”53 They are also, it seems clear, related to
the ambiguous properties of baroque images and of the complexity of
Donne’s lyric poems – structures that also seem to think in images and to
contain unreconciled extremes.
Conceits, Baroque Images, and Allegorical Tropes

There are several poems in The Songs and Sonets that are organized,
unusually, around a single image. The images are treated in different ways,
but often they turn out to be baroque images in Benjamin’s sense. In
“A Jeat Ring Sent,” for example, the object identified in the title is
immediately given three contrary possible meanings in a trope formation
that seems to be self-conscious of the poetics of the baroque image:
Thou art not so black, as my heart,
Nor halfe so brittle, as her heart, thou art;
What would’st thou say? shall both our properties by thee bee spoke,
Nothing more endlesse, nothing sooner broke?
First the ring is compared to the hearts of the couple alluded to in this
poem. But the hearts each have a different “property” (a term Donne uses
in the plural), and the ring, as a single image, signifies both of them,
uniting two disparate signifieds. First the ring’s blackness is noted and
connected to the speaker’s heart; then, the brittleness of the jet is empha-
sized and compared to the brittleness of the heart of “her” who has sent
this love token. The speaker apostrophizes this object and asks if that is
indeed the message signified by the object and adds one more quality to
each of these two properties: the speaker’s “black heart,” in turn represent-
ing his constant but despairing love, which is also “endlesse” like the circle
of the ring. But the brittleness of the sender’s heart suggests her own love
will soon be broken. The idea that the “hearts” of the couple are to be
taken in turn as figures signifying their love each for the other is supported
when, in the next stanza, the speaker complains that the jet is an appro-
priate material as a token for them because “Marriage rings are not of this
stuffe,” but this black and brittle ring is, given the nature of their relation-
ship, an appropriate token to “Figure our loves.” It suggests impermanence
and implies that the sender considers their love to be, like the jet ring,
“cheap, and nought but fashion.”
The ring, then, is an excellent example of a Benjaminian baroque image,
signifying different and clashing meanings but formally uniting them in
one dialectical image. And as Katrin Ettenhuber noted in her discussion of
the poem, it is one whose language can provide clues as to how Donne
himself thought of his own invention process, at least in this case. He
begins with an image as a token of a love relationship and contemplates
how the image possesses properties (its “adjacents” in the rhetorical
manuals of the day – that is, the qualities that are commonplaces of that
object, like the jet’s black color and brittleness) that can be compared to
qualities of the relationship.54 If this interpretation is correct, then Donne
is thinking of images in terms very like those that Benjamin describes as
properties of the baroque image.
Donne’s use of singular baroque images in Benjamin’s sense is also
illustrated well in his verse letter “To Mr. George Herbert, with one of my
Figure 1 Donne seal, reproduced with the kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of
Salisbury Cathedral.
Seales, of the anchor and of Christ.” The poem is in effect an emblem

poem because it is a commentary on a visual image, the new seal presum-
ably sealing the letter in which the poem is transmitted (see Figure 1).
Donne’s family had earlier used as its seal an image of entwined serpents,
but, as the poem explains, “Our old coat lost, unto new armes I go.” The
new one shows a cross that at its bottom is curved like an anchor, glossed
in the poem as an image of Christ (“He that makes our Crosses Anchors
thus”) by giving salvation through his death on the cross. This interpret-
ation of the image is certainly an example of paradox and wit, and it
contains a double meaning: death on the cross, but also faith and hope for
salvation as signified by the anchor.
But it is the first seal, that of the “sheafe of Snakes” (it is possible that
this seal was also affixed to the letter or otherwise familiar to Herbert), that
provides a more economical and elegant example of a double-meaning
baroque image in Benjamin’s sense. The serpents, traditionally seen as
images of evil or sin and also traditionally associated with the devil, can
also signify wisdom and redemption by Christ:
Yet may I, with this, my first Serpents hold,
God gives new blessings, and yet leaves the old;
The Serpent may, as wise, my pattern be;
My poison, as he feeds on dust, that’s me.
And as he rounds the Earth to murder sure
My death he is, but on the cross my cure.55
Three separate biblical allusions to serpents are behind the wit and triple
meaning here. The serpent is wise in a saying of Jesus, “Be ye therefore
wise as serpents” (Matt. 10:16) as well as traditionally identified with
Satan in the curse of the serpent from Genesis, “Thou art cursed above
all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go,
and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” (Gen. 3:14–15). Finally, in
Numbers Moses was commanded by God to create a serpent of brass and
display it on a pole as a cure for snake bites (Num. 21:5–9) – an image
the Gospel of Saint John then applies to Jesus in the verse, “And as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of
man be lifted up” (John 3:14).56 Donne merges these separate biblical
passages and fuses them in the one image of the serpents on his old seal,
producing exactly the effect Benjamin defines for the baroque image in
his writings – albeit in a three-fold set of paradoxical meanings rather
than the usual two.
The resources of biblical imagery made these kinds of figures common
in the religious writings, but they are also found in the secular poems, for
example, in the famous image of the Phoenix I touched on in the previous
chapter. The image, originally described by Herodotus as a creature said to
exist by certain priests in Egypt he had met (Herodotus says he is skeptical)
was refashioned by early Church fathers into an emblem of the Christian
doctrines of Christ’s resurrection and of the individual resurrection of the
body at the Last Judgment (see above, Chapter 3). Donne assumes a sense
of religious mystery associated with the image (“Wee dye and rise the
same, and prove / Mysterious by this love”) but transfers the aura of
sacredness to the act of sexual love – along with a complex of other
feelings.
In light of the properties of the baroque image defined by Benjamin in
his writings on allegory, we can see that the Phoenix functions very much
in the mode of emblematic, complex image with multiple significations in
unresolved dialectical tension – a confrontation of extremes that resists
dialectical synthesis. As noted in the last chapter, at a bodily level the
Phoenix image signifies Iago’s “beast with two backs,” the conjoined
bodies of the lovers in coition:
The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
By us, we two being one are it.
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
We dye, and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
But the Phoenix is also a sacred symbol of Christian faith in the bodily
resurrection, a meaning implied by the references to mystery that conclude
this section – as well as by the poem’s later references to the lovers’ being
misidentified as saints by future poetry-lovers encountering them in
sonnets of pretty rooms. Material bodily sexuality and spiritual theological
mystery both deny each other yet coexist in this baroque image of
extremes, signaled in the celebrated double meaning of “dye”: “We dye,
and rise the same”: we experience sexual climax and then return to normal,
and that act shares in the mystery and holiness of Christ’s death and
resurrection.
Thus this theory of dialectical extremes is relevant to the set of tropes
that have traditionally been called Metaphysical conceits. This property, in
fact, was pointed out in passing by Helen Gardner in a characterization
quoted above: “Here a conceit is like a spark made by striking two stones
together. After the flash the stones are just two stones. Metaphysical poetry
abounds in such flashes.” Compare this formula with one made on behalf
of Benjamin’s allegorical style of reading:
For as his writings on language indubitably suggest, if language’s reality
required a style of reading that could cope with its interruptive, caesura-like
force, it also called for another gift: the ability to recognize the flash of
lightning, the magic of similarities and correspondences, in poetic, histor-
ical, and secular no less than in sacred texts.57
Both Gardner and Hanssen give apt descriptions of the unity/disunity that
we see at work in “The Canonization.” Gardner’s observation about
Donne’s tropes especially is one that Benjamin, ever the compiler of
quotations that could make his own points for him, doubtlessly would
have savored.
And consider in this context a fuller passage from The Origin I quoted in
part before:
But it will be unmistakably apparent, especially to anyone who is familiar
with allegorical textual exegesis, that all of the things which are used to
signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a
power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane
things, which raises them onto a higher plane and which can, indeed,
sanctify them. Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is
both elevated and devalued.58
This seems directly relevant to the double meaning of the image of the
Phoenix in “The Canonization.”
Synthesizing several of Benjamin’s essays on language and the idea of
similarity, Beatrice Hanssen discusses in addition how Benjamin redefined
reading itself as enabling moments of fleeting “illumination” involving the
perception of similarities between objects:
Whether profane or magical (as in astrology), reading was the gift that
enabled the spirit to participate in another temporality, in which similarities
flashed up out of the flood of things. Such acts of illumination required,
however, that the mimetic come to appearance in and through language’s
semiotic, communicative side.59
Those comments also make for an excellent commentary on the dialectical
religio-sexual contradictions of the “The Canonization,” as well as of
several other central baroque images in The Songs and Sonets. In the light
provided by the precedent of the transference in “The Canonization” of
religious feeling to love, sex, and art, we ought to reconsider as well the
several “two-in-one” poems that assert the unity of the two separate lovers
through various metaphorical images and which, as we saw in Chapter 3,
are central to Donne’s utopian love poetry. In that chapter I discussed
three of them – “The good-morrow,” “A Valediction of weeping,” and
“The Canonization”– – but without focusing on the central conceits of an
oxymoronic two-in-one. There is also the famous “A Valediction forbid-
ding mourning,” “The Extasie,” “Loves infiniteness,” and possibly as well
“Aire and Angels” and “The Flea.” While the tone, the levels of containing
irony, and the themes differ significantly across these poems, as is common
in Donne, there is a certain constancy in their use of this figure. They all
reference something close to the Thomistic and Aristotelian idea of the co-
dependency of body and soul in the formation of human nature, the
hylomorphic union. Since Aquinas had taken pains to make the concept
compatible with Christian doctrines of the resurrection of the body, it was
probably his version that Donne is closer to. Aquinas also used this notion
to help formulate religious mysteries like the two natures of Christ 60 – and
which was ultimately transferred into the political-theological notion of the
king’s two bodies.61 This concern with body and soul, is, as Ramie Targoff
demonstrates, a central one across the corpus of Donne’s work, and it is
certainly an issue in “A Valediction forbidding mourning.” But the most
famous of the figures in that poem – the celebrated, clashing comparison
of the souls of the two lovers in separation with a pair of drafter’s
compasses – represents not the body and soul, but the souls of the two
separated lovers. We will see, however, that the body–soul issue is a theme
here as well, albeit in the form of a subtext signaled by double entendres.
The entirety of the poem should be considered in order to understand
the way it deploys its baroque images in the kind of allegorical structure
Benjamin described for baroque art: here Donne uses images as signifiers
of one or more distinct meanings, but in a way that, in effect, constantly
defers the moment of unification and focus that they would seem to
pursue. And in this poem the issue involves the complex connections
and contradictions of spiritual and physical love, connected to the relation
of body and soul.
Here, the spiritual clearly dominates in the poem’s first set of baroque
images. First, the lovers’ unity at this moment of parting is expressed as
that between body and soul at the moment of a peaceful death. The
implied comparison makes the separation a kind of death, but a “good
death,” one of a “virtuous man” in the process of transmuting from a lower
to a higher state.62 It is, however, a death nonetheless, materially speaking,
just as the lovers’ separation is real at one level, but at another it is an
illusion, their spiritual unity persisting despite a physical separation. The
result is the kind of dialectical clash discussed previously.
Then begins a series of what Benjamin calls “substitutions,” his term for
the succession of related but different images of allegory in which compari-
sons resist unity, each one, as it were, starting over the comparison but
linking up with it too. In an earlier work, I called it a process of deferment.63
It is like the metonymy identified in structuralist and poststructuralist
theory and utilized in Lacan and in de Man’s discussion of allegory, but it
is not metonymy in a strict sense, since the links between the elements in
the series of comparisons can be loose, new ways of thinking about the
signified, and not based on the usual associations of usage or commonplaces
that form the links in that trope; Benjamin avoids that term, noting in
passing that the allegory is based on a process and an overall vision.
We can see how such a movement from one “substitute” to another
works when the poem transitions from microcosm to macrocosm in a
comparison of the separation of body and soul in death to the macrocosmic
movements caused by earthquakes and the “trepidation of the spheares”:
Moving of th’earth brings harmes and feares
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.
In these images, not the union of the lovers, but rather the nature of the
separation between them after the good-bye, is in question. A distinction is
formed between a harmful movement of the earth and a far larger, but
nevertheless harmless movement, caused by the slight wobbling of the
earth’s axis, but explained in the Ptolemaic system as a small shifting
movement of the outermost heavenly sphere that affects all the others –
small in its context, but since it is cosmic in scale, it is far greater than any
earthly movements we know. Most editors assume an earthquake is meant
by the phrase “moving of th’earth,” but it is just possible that the phrasing,
so suggestive of the idea of the challenge of Copernican to Ptolemaic
astronomy alluded to in The First Anniversary, references that resultant
cultural anxiety as well, as Charles Monroe Coffin assumed in his pioneer-
ing study of Donne and the new philosophy.64 In this reading, the
“moving of th’earth” (around the sun) is much greater even than that of
an earthquake, but the cultural anxiety of “harmes and feares” it causes is
still less than the outer sphere’s “trepidation.” Such a reading also displays
another form of dissonance in that it mixes Copernican and Ptolemaic
cosmologies in one stanza.
In this poem’s allegorical comparison, esoteric lore about the natural
world is likened to the distance between lovers when one of them takes a
voyage. The comparison resists unity precisely because the scale and what
we might call the metaphysical status of the two realms are so far apart:
human events and emotions are likened to huge natural phenomena. An
element of choice and will is implied about the emotions (the beloved is
being persuaded not to mourn the lover’s departure), while the natural
forces they are compared to are implacable. Fragments of Donne’s
immense and varied learning are being brought into play as arbitrary
counters in an artwork; they are playful, but full of deep feeling as well.
The imagery, as Benjamin writes of the baroque imagery of the Trauerspiel,
is contradictory, unresolved, and rich.
The next stanza continues the (Ptolemaic) astronomical references by
implicitly placing the two lovers allegorically in contact with the heavenly
regions above the moon, where, in contrast to “Dull sublunary lovers love,”
no change nor imperfection can be found. In this case, however, what
is passionately asserted about the signified side of the allegorical fragment
is as extravagant, as exemplary of baroque hyperbole, as is the signifier:
But we by’a love, so much refin’d
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.
This is one of the most unqualified assertions of the power of spiritual love
independent of sexuality to be found in Donne – though as we will see, the
double meanings of the poem’s concluding image supplement it or even
call it in question, asserting the importance of sexuality to the lovers when
the traveler has returned from the voyage. But this moment of apparent
stability is soon undermined, in the next “substitution” or development of
the imagery.
In this case, after asserting the transcendent unity of the two lovers’
souls even in physical separation (though figured in striking but oddly
materialist and emotionally clashing imagery: “Like gold to ayery thinnesse
beate”), Donne shifts the emphasis in the next image to the idea of the
“two” in his conception of two in one:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’ other doe.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and harkins after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th’other foot obliquely runne.
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
The comparison is emblematic, a description of an object that can easily be

pictured, accompanied by an elaboration of several possible dimensions of
the image – first, as a static description, but soon put in motion, with
emphasis on the relative distinctions of the two compass feet. The one in
the center is clearly identified as representing the addressee of the poem,
who stays at the center; the second is like the voyager, roaming at a
distance. The description suggests circles or curves of different dimensions:
at first the oblique angle of the two compass legs made when the distance is
extended, and then a different angle, with the legs more “erect,” signaling a
smaller circle with the two separate points in close proximity. Finally,
another property of the circle formed by the draftsman with compasses is
described, the sense of completion created when the extended leg com-
pletes the circle and ends up at its starting point. These are, of course,
contradictory, “baroque” movements.
But this emblem is presented as an explicit metaphor in phrases such
as “Thy soule the fixt foot,” “thy firmnes,” and “makes me end, where
I begunne” – just as emblems often have implicit points of comparison, as
we saw above. But the words used to describe the visual image have
connotations that undermine the passionate assertions of the power of
spiritual love independent of sexuality and displace the apparent unified
theme. “A Valediction” invokes the spiritual union of the two souls not, as
in “The Extasie,” as an image of sexual union, but as a consolation for the
physical separation of two lovers, an argument that the spiritual union will
endure physical absence. But as many readers and critics have pointed out,
the language at the end of the poem seems to reference sexuality in the idea
of the compasses’ legs, which grow “erect, as that comes home” and in the
poem’s final words “and makes me end where I begun,” which allude not
only to the return from the voyage but also can be seen to reference a
return to the vaginal cavity from which the speaker emerged at birth. The
poem, then, is allegorical in its resistance to unity as it moves from one
image to the next, as well as in some of its double meanings.
“The Extasie”: Allegorical Form and Technique

We see something similar in Donne’s celebrated and much analyzed “The
Extasie.” While I cannot here begin to do justice to the complex of issues
raised in the extensive literature on this poem, I want to suggest how a
Benjaminian reading might apply to some of its aspects, through a reading
that emphasizes how the poem is structured as a series of images related to
each other as allegorical “substitutions” – most of them employing “foreign
terms” (as Gracián calls them) in the form of metaphors or similes that use
vehicles from outside the usual semantic associations of the primary image.
Like most of The Songs and Sonets, the poem is a kind of mini-drama as the
souls of the two main characters merge and produce the poem’s “dialogue
of one.” And like a drama, it has a setting and an imagined onstage
audience. Formally, however, it is a succession of fragmented allegories
producing a masterful baroque assemblage of changing imagery that
produces a “progression in a series of moments,” as Benjamin, quoting a
phrase of one of his sources, Friedrich Creuzer, puts it.65
The poem is comprised of two sets of images: the first a set of compari-
sons that seek to describe the nature of the poem’s title event, the ecstasy
productive of a merger between the two lovers’ souls into a (varyingly
described) unity; the second, another series of comparisons and images,
also concerned with unity within duality, but in this case the unity of body
and soul. While the obsession with the issue of two-in-one gives the poem
a certain thematic unity (and I will return to the implications of this
below), the dizzying series of foreign terms, drawn from fields as diverse as
alchemy, astrology, medicine, metallurgy, and more, suggests the frag-
mented domain of shattered worldviews which underlies the baroque
and its aesthetics of fragmentation.
The poem begins with an allegorical landscape, signifying sexuality and
possibly reproduction:
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swelled up
To rest the violet’s reclining head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.
This recalls in some ways the two great allegorical gardens in Spenser’s The
Fairie Queene, the Bower of Bliss of Book 2 and the Garden of Adonis of
Book 3. Like them it relies more on association and suggestion than on the
one-to-one correspondences we sometimes see in Spenserian allegory. In
Donne the “pillow on a bed” and a “pregnant bank” that “swelled up”
make the association with sexuality subtly but undeniably, without any
kind of metaphor or simile explicitly linking the natural scene and sexual
feeling. The imagery is “double” and hence baroque in the sense that it at
once evokes a naturalistic scene that is also a signifier of sexual desire. The
poem thus evokes an eroticized nature in a complementary relation to
human love, quite different from the fallen nature of the libertine poems.
The apparent random reference to violets is also a preparation, supplying
the metaphoric vehicle for one of the later comparisons defining the
qualities of souls in love that weave through the poem. Because of its
departure from the rest of the imagery, the nonmetaphoric opening creates
from the beginning a kind of dissonance that will need to be attended to as
we contemplate the interrelations of the chain of figures.
With the setting established, the poem moves almost cinematically to
introduce the main characters, the lovers. But significantly, as part of an
aesthetics of fragmentation, they are presented through fragments or body
parts: the hands and the eyes.
Our hands were firmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string.
In both cases the fragments also act as synecdoches to represent the bodies
of the two lovers, who are said to be physically united in ways that express
hyperbolic extremes and suggest sexual union, indirectly but unmistak-
ably. They thus preview the ending movement of the poem in physical sex.
But dissonance and extreme emotion are suggested by the twisted eye-
beams since they defy the logic of the early modern theories of sight, which
posited a radar-like light beam emitted actively from each eye – but in no
case in a helical structure! The poem’s speaker underlines the sexuality in
the next stanza, which links the unions of hands and eyes with coition but
emphasizes that this is but metaphorical foreplay:
So to’entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
After this, the poem’s imagistic strategy changes, and we are presented with
the first of the two series of images (or series of Benjaminian “substitutes”),
each one acting as a physical vehicle to signify a spiritual unity. First come
the ones that specify the mystical union of two souls that follow from the
intergrafted hands and mutually locked eyes. But between stanzas 3 and 4,
each of the souls of the two lovers apparently has left his/her body,
undergoing the ecstasy or “going out of” normal space as specified in the
poem’s title:66 “Our soules, (which to advance their state, / Were gone
out,) hung ’twixt her, and mee.” This is figured by an epic image of two
armies in stalemated battle beginning a negotiation “to advance their
state,” in analogy to two souls initiating their own tentative negotiations.
At this moment, the souls are still separate but no longer incarnated. As if
to emphasize that quality, another image, of “sepulchrall statues,” is
introduced to underline the rigidity of the abandoned bodies and suggest
the analogy of the ecstasy with death through the term “sepulchrall.”
Then we go on to the next “moment” or “substitution.” An outside
observer is imagined, one “refin’d” by love, who would be successively a
linguist (“he soules language understood”), a kind of philosopher or
spiritual adept (“And by good love were growen all minde”), and an
alchemist (“Might thence a new concoction take / And part farre purer
then he came”). This ideal figure is the ideal witness of the next stage of the
ecstasy, the mixing of the two lovers’ souls into two new “mixt soules.”
Not exactly an object, this imagined observer belongs to the rhetorical
structure of the poem, representing its ideal audience. He or she appears
again in the very last stanza. His or her appearance varies the poem’s
imagistic techniques and supplies an occasion for the first reported speech
of the new plural subject of mixed souls:
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
Wee see, we saw not what did move.
These lines have great relevance to the theme of equal heterosexual love
explored in the previous chapter. They assert a spiritual love independent
of sexual difference, and that is a remarkable idea, particularly in an age
when even Montaigne was unable to imagine such an equal love except
between two men (see his essay “On Friendship”).
In a sense, the overall progression of the poem’s imagery is designed to
make the idea of equal love between heterosexual partners inescapable.
There is the matter of the ability of two souls, the man’s and the woman’s,
to merge and mix. The first movement of this mixing of different-but-
equals is described in terms taken from realms of divinity and mystical
knowledge, transferred to profane love:
But as all severall soules containe
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that.
Love is an alchemist mixing souls, but the souls are already themselves
mixtures of other things. The idea that the soul is “elemented” or consists
of several parts was a Scholastic one with roots in Augustine and Aquinas.67
Commonly the vegetable, animal, and intellectual souls were distinguished
from each other, and sometimes the memory, reason, and the will were held
to be distinguishable components or aspects of the soul as well,68 although
Donne here makes the idea of the parts indefinite and mysterious. The point
is to define the next “moment” of the process of ecstasy, the creation of two
new souls, apparently now two in the sense of maintaining distinctly separate
existences from the other (“each this and that”) – but unified in the sense that
each is a mirror of the other (“both one”). A new image is called for to try to
“capture” the paradoxical situation of two-in-one, and it is supplied by the
violet casually mentioned in the allegorical landscape of stanza 1:
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poore, and scant,)
Redoubles still and multiplies.
The connection to the opening mention of a violet on the hill where the
lovers sit is artful, and there is something emblematic and hence allegorical
about the image of a transplanted violet, but the exact idea is not clear. At
first the violet is clearly single, and the point is its increase in “strength,
colour, and size” after the transplant, just as the new single soul of the
lovers grows. But I have seen many wild violets growing with two flowers
on a single stem, and it is just possible that Donne is alluding to this
phenomenon when he says the violet “Redoubles still and multiplies”; or,
this could mean that there are two violets where before there was one. If we
are meant to envision not just the “strength, colour, and size” growing, but
also the flower doubling then multiplying, it would take two simultaneous
images (like the ones described by Benjamin in a previous quote) to
illustrate the idea that in a changed environment an originally single violet
can first became two (“redoubles”), then many. Perhaps it would take a
moving picture, in which case the moment of “two-in-one” would be a
brief transition before it multiplies.
In short, the image is ambiguous: it is a Benjaminian baroque image, in
one meaning signifying a single merged soul from the original two, in
another suggesting two souls that in turn potentially become multiple
in allusion to the “mixture of things, they know not what” in the mixed
souls formed in the ecstatic negotiations.
In the next “moment” of this complexly unfolding poem, however, we
move definitively toward the concept of the unity of the two souls rather
than their separation, a state described in a very Donne-like coinage as a
fantastic process of interanimation, the souls negotiating outside their
bodies and merging, creating a single “abler soule”:
When love, with one another so
Interanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.
Here Donne eschews his favorite allegorical strategy of bringing in some

external term from a fragmented world to reverberate with (and as Helen
Gardner has it, create sparks with) a metaphoric subject or tenor with
which it shares some unexpected similarity. Instead, he describes the
merger directly, with only subdued metaphoric suggestiveness in the terms
“flow” and the idea of controlling “defects.”
There is ambiguity at work here, however – in the question of whether
the description is itself figurative of a deep meeting of minds rather than a
straightforward description meant to be taken at face value; or, is it literal,
a genuine spiritual merger taking place in space, like the love-making of
the angels Milton describes in Paradise Lost – and which, just possibly,
Donne and his contemporaries might have thought a credible idea?69 This
description, then, is in that sense also a baroque image, or at least a poetic
technique sharing the quality of baroque ambiguity.
The next stanza ratifies the idea of unity by emphasizing the existence of
a new merged soul in the singular, but retains the idea that it has been
forged through the union of two:
Wee, then, who are this new soule, know
Of what we are compos’d, and made,
For th’Atomies of which we grow,
Are soules, whom no change can invade.
True to the mystical tradition whose terms Donne is transforming to

depict the experience of secular love, the spiritual merger is describable
only in material terms, as “Atomies of which we grow” – in turn said to be
immune from change, even though through the interanimation they have
just experienced a profound change. And these claims in turn follow the
passionate and ambiguous earlier assertion, “This Extasie doth unperplex.”
At one level, the lovers are unperplexed in their discovery of their spiritual
equality. But at another, the process of the merger of two souls is so
complex that most readers are indeed perplexed in contemplating it. The
lovers are unperplexed, but the poem’s implied readers are not.
Thus, as mentioned previously, the meeting and merger of the two souls
also paradoxically affirms – quite against the grain of several of Donne’s
assertions in the libertine poems – the essential equality of the souls of the
two genders, their ability to merge together and mutually share each other,
irrespective of the sex differences of the bodies. And this quality turns
sexual merger into something else as well, as becomes clear in the poem’s
rhapsodic conclusion. Logic, as so often in Donne, has given way to
something deeper, a visionary insight into a utopian sexual equality. Pierre
Legouis famously argued that the poem was in essence a seduction poem,
an argument for sexual intercourse as a complement to spiritual love.70 But
I believe this is a trivializing interpretation. At one level it seems question-
able because there is considerable suggestion, in the setting and in the
actions described, that the beloved does not really require much persuasion
to have sex. She is there in a secluded spot with her lover and engaging in a
kind of extended foreplay from the beginning, albeit foreplay of the
spiritualizing sort sometimes found in Eastern religio-sexual practices.
But however one may want to understand the lovers’ (fictional) relation-
ship, this should in no way obscure the deep assertions the poem makes
about gender equality and the spiritual dignity of sex.
To reach this point, however, is the work of a new section of Donne’s
intricate argument, a new substitution, as he turns from the union of two
souls to the union of body and soul. A new series of “two in one” images
follows, but this time to figure not the spiritual union of the lovers’ two
souls (as in the poem’s first twelve stanzas), but rather to characterize the
relation of body and soul in an effort to sanctify a sexual union as both an
expression and an image of spiritual love. The first of this new series of
baroque “moments” compares the body to the celestial spheres and the
soul to the “intelligences” who turn them in Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astron-
omy – a comparison emphasizing the subordination of the body and the
separation of body and soul. The second turns to metallurgy, asserting that
body and soul merge the way two metals like copper and tin merge into
the alloy bronze – emphasizing the idea of unity and the creation of an
“abler soule.” This, of course, does not cohere with the previous idea of
subordination – the series of comparisons is neither consistent nor
uniform. It follows a baroque structure of dissonant, agglomerated unity.
There follow two other learned comparisons. One draws from astrol-
ogy, asserting that air acts as an intermediary in conveying the influence
of the stars on human events, just as the body is the intermediary so that
“soule into the soule may flow / Though it to body first repair.” This
makes the body indispensable for spiritual merger. Similarly, medicine or
physic is brought into play with its subtle doctrine of bodily “spirits,”
which are ethereal but still physical and form a necessary intermediary
between body and soul, enabling their hylomorphic union. But the image
conveying this function is homely: fingers tying knots to bond the two.
The effect is jarring, dissonant – and ambiguous like a Benjaminian
baroque image. The concept of the bodily spirits in itself dignifies the
body as soul-like, but the image of the knots turns it domestic and
physical.
We move then to the next “moment,” a new image, another variation
on the attempt to capture the relation of body and soul: an imprisoned
Prince in need of rescue, figuring the soul incapable of external communi-
cation without the body. This in effect subordinates soul to body in a
foreshadowing of the paradoxical dialectics of Hegel’s take on the relation
of servant and master. Finally, the poem culminates this series of baroque
substitutions with the post-Hegelian Derridean image of writing’s relation
to thought: “Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is
his booke.”
The last stanza emphasizes once more the unity of duality in the
paradoxical phrase, “And if some lover, such as wee, / have heard this
dialogue of one,” summarizing and calling to mind the first set of images,
and then moving to the second set of images trying to conceptualize the
codependence of body and soul – and therefore the dignity of sexual love.
In that way, when the speaker asserts that it is time for a shift from
spiritual to physical love, it is a matter of making explicit the allegorical
signified that had already been implied, and using an analogy with the
structure of the sacraments (employing the physical to manifest the spirit-
ual) to accommodate “weake men”:
To’our bodies turne wee then, that so
Weake men on love reveal’d may looke;
Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke.
No wonder, then, as the poem’s concluding stanza states:
And if some lover, such as wee,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still marke us, he shall see
Small change, when we’are to bodies gone.
The structure of this celebrated conclusion – and the poem as a whole – is
thoroughly allegorical in Benjamin’s sense: it is formed as a series of related
comparisons that dance before us, none completely and coherently a replica
of the other, but connected nevertheless in a nonunified unity endemic to
the baroque sensibility. We see this structure over and over in The Songs
and Sonets and elsewhere, especially in the repeated attempts to define the
union of body and soul by interpreting the body’s link to the soul as the
Derridean and de Manian relation of writing to speech, in a structure that
manifests as well the way Donne’s poems function as dialectical images,
coming into their own (new) moments of legibility not only in the
Modernist 1920s but in our era of continuing Postmodernism as well.
Two-in-One and the Baroque

It seems clear that the problem of two-in-one is a fundamental theme and
aesthetic technique not only here, but in much of Donne’s poetry. The
structure is depicted over and over and represented in any number of
corresponding allegorical objects. And it is never resolved, although some
of the endings of the poems (and this is the case for “The Extasie”) appear
momentarily to do so. On examination, however, such resolutions tend to
self-deconstruct, or to work by dissolving other apparently established
solutions in their poems. The two-in-one issue is a paradox whose possible
solutions appear to be endless and never logically consistent. They provide
one of the crucial forms of baroque imagery for Donne’s poems because
they are interminable and resistant to organic unity.
“The Extasie” – and it is not alone in this among Donne’s verbal
creations – is thus structured in significant ways like one of Montaigne’s
characteristically dialectical essays – or like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and
related works. In an essay such as “Of Repentance,” Montaigne explores
several possible ways to think about the self, treating the subject like a
many-faceted jewel, turning it this way to catch a particular light, then
another way, on so on. The self is an unstructured flux, he says at one point.
But it has a fixed quality, a pattern of one’s own that seems to resist all
attempts at socialization, he asserts at another. Then again, we are living and
changing beings, not tied down to one set of practices. At the end, we are
left with the sum parts of a set of logically contradictory positions, but in
ways that make us wiser, not intellectually hopeless,71 and this is a practice
that Donne pursues in many of his great lyrics like “The Extasie” as well.
Similarly, Hamlet (and other Shakespeare works, though Hamlet is the
extreme case) unfolds in a similar way, with investigations of its issues from
multiple points of view – and with the further similarity to a Donne poem
that it contains a set of allegorical objects that form a nonorganically
unified set of contradictory ideas that make the play in its large structures
a set of fragmented allegories.72
Benjamin can help us expand our view of Donne’s use of tropes
considerably, beyond the too narrow focus bequeathed to us by New
Critics on the so-called Metaphysical conceit, which is, as we saw, a term
that is both anachronistic in terms of its usage in Donne’s day and too
restrictive for our own. He helps us expand our horizons beyond those of
the new and old historicism’s attempts to straitjacket him into the
restricted space of our own partial and uncertain constructions of the
limits of his own time. He helps us see that issues of form have not been
exhausted by the efforts of twentieth-century Formalist critics.
Benjamin suggests instead a poet immersed in a fragmented baroque
world consistently deferring the moment of unity and full meaning he so
manifestly hungers after. He suggests a Donne whose repeated use of baroque
images make his ambiguity not only consistent (it may be the only quality
that is) but structural, an aspect of the overall allegorical resistance to unity
and totality. This Donne belongs both to his own era and to ours as well.
Notes
1 Judith Scherer Herz, “Tracking the Voiceprint of Donne,” John Donne Journal
26: 269–82; 280. Scherer is quoting and repurposing a phrase in a poem by
Brenda Hillman, “Phone Booth.”
4 See Katrin Ettenhuber, “‘Comparisons Are Odious’?: Revisiting the Meta-
physical Conceit in Donne,” Review of English Studies 62.255 (2010): 393–413,
for a similar argument drawing somewhat different specific conclusions from
my own. I return to this stimulating article below.
5 F[rank] J. W[arnke], “Conceit,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, enlarged ed. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1974).
6 There are a number of accounts of how the word “Metaphysical” became
attached to a group of seventeenth-century English poets led by Donne, and
they all agree that Johnson, picking up and reapplying a word used by John
Dryden about Donne (see Chapter 1 above) was the seminal figure in the process.
See, for example, the widely influential account by Helen Gardner, “Introduc-
tion,” in The Metaphysical Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 15–29; 15–17.
7 Thus, the argument of Ettenhuber, “‘Comparisons Are Odious’?,” to the effect
that Samuel Johnson is the inventor of the term “metaphysical conceit,” is
right in spirit but wrong according to the letter.
8 Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Abraham Cowley,” excerpted in Samuel John-
son, Lives of the English Poets: Selections (New York: Gateway, 1955), 4.
9 Johnson, “The Life of Abraham Cowley,” 2.
10 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (online), s.v. “conceit,” def. 8 a.
11 Sir Richard Baker, Chronicles (1643), 2: 156; quoted in R. C. Bald, John Donne:
A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 72.
12 Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Litera-
ture and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 29–62.
13 John Hales [of Eton], Golden remains of the ever memorable Mr. John Hales of
Eton College (1659), Wing (2nd ed.) H269, Sermon, image 44, p. 27; http://
name.umdl.umich.edu/A44395.0001.001.
14 “The Dream of Life,” Dublin University Magazine, 1833–1877 (July 1872:
110–19; 111.
15 Henry Kittle White, The Remains of Henry Kittle White of Nottingham, with an
Account of His Life by Robert Southey, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1816), 1:
242–43; https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008408418.
16 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Dent, 1910;
reprint, 1967), 51–52.
17 Dayton Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 261–62, reports that among the praises of Donne in
Felix Schelling, “Introduction,” in Elizabethan Lyrics (Boston: Ginn, 1895),
was one of reenergizing the conceit as a poetic technique.
18 Herbert J. C. Grierson, “Introduction,” in Grierson, ed., The Poems of John
Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 2: xxxix–xl.
19 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York:
Harcourt, 1964), 242
20 Gardner, “Introduction,” 19.
23 In the several treatises on wit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there
is likewise a plethora of trope-like forms in which wit manifests itself, with the
cases of the metaphor and similitude or simile of wit just two of many
possibilities. I discuss these treatises in more detail below and in the next
chapter.
24 Sir John Beaumont, “An Elegy to the Living Memory of His Deceased Friend,
Sir John Beaumont, Knight, Baronet,” Bosvvorth-field with a taste of the variety
of other poems, left by Sir Iohn Beaumont, Baronet, deceased: set forth by his
sonne, Sir Iohn Beaumont, Baronet; and dedicated to the Kings most Excellent
Maiestie. 1629; http://dmi.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/-7715386525159034471.
25 George Gascoigne, A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde vp in one small Poesie.
Gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish Gardins of Euripides,
Ouid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by inuention, out of our owne
fruitefull Orchardes in Englande: Yelding sundrie svveete sauours of Tragical,
Comical, and Morall Discourses, bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well
smellyng noses of learned Readers (London: Richarde Smith, 1573); Early English
Prose Fiction, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A01513.0001.001.
26 The field’s turn to more historicizing approaches to Donne may be the reason
why there is no entry for “metaphysical conceit” in the index of the otherwise
comprehensive The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami,
Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011). In informal conversations with some of those associated with the
handbook at the Annual Meeting of the John Donne Society, Baton Rouge,
LA, Feb. 26–28, 2015, I learned that this was an oversight rather than a
conscious decision. But it is symptomatic of the relative decline in the use
of the term in recent years in Donne studies.
27 The same conclusion is reached in a useful survey by K. K. Ruthven, The
Conceit (London: Methuen, 1969), 1–4, and by Ettenhuber, “‘Comparisons
Are Odious’?,” 399–405.
28 According to A. A. Parker, Polyphemus and Galatea: A Study in the Interpret-
ation of a Baroque Poem (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 12–13, the
earliest such work survives in the form of student notes taken before 1640 on a
course called De acuto et arguto at the University of Cracow given by the Jesuit
scholar and poet Matthew Casimir Sarbiewski. A bilingual Latin-Polish ver-
sion of Sarbiewski’s theoretical writings on poetry, including De acuto et
arguto, is Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, Wyklady poetyki (Praecepta poetica),
Instituto Ossolinskich Academiae Polonicae Scientiarum (Wrorclaw-Krakow,
1958). Other published works on wit were Matteo Perigrini, Delle acutezze
(1639); Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y el arte de ingenio (1642; 1649); Sforza
Pallavicino, Trattato delle stile e del dialogo (1646); Matteo Perigrini, Il fonte
dell’ ingegno (1650); Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (1654); and
Francisco Leitão Ferreira, Nova arte de conceitos (1718). Parker notes that the
student notes from Poland record that Sabiewski told his students that he had
often discussed these topics with other Jesuit rhetoric professors in Italy (12).
Although he does not state it in this work, Parker told his class on baroque
poetics (of which I was a member in 1974) that he believed there must have
been some common, orally transmitted Jesuit ideas about wit and rhetoric
from which all or most of these authors drew.
29 Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y el arte de ingenio, ed. Evaristo Correa Calderón,
2 vols. (Madrid: Castalia, 1969). All subsequent quotes are from this edition.
30 Translation in Hugh Grady, “Rhetoric, Wit, and Art in Gracián’s Agudeza,”
Modern Language Quarterly 41.1 (March 1980): 21–37; 33 n. 29). The original
reads: “Son los tropos y figuras retóricas materia y como fundamento para que
sobre ellos levante sus primores la agudeza y lo que la retórica tiene por
formildad, esta nuestra arte por materia sobre que echa y esmalte de su
artificio” (Gracián, Agudeza, 1: 204).
31 After quoting a Góngora sonnet built around traditional paradoxes of the
short life but intense beauty of a rose, Gracián comments: “Esta correspon-
dencia es genérica a todos los conceptos, y abraza todo el artificio del ingenio,
que aunque éste sea tal vez por contraposición y dissonancia, aquello mismo
es artificiosa connexión de los objectos” (1: 56) (“This correspondence is
generic to all conceits and embraces all the artfulness of the ingenious mind,
which, although this may sometimes be by means of contraposition and
dissonance, remains still the same artful connection between objects”),
translation mine.
32 My translation of: “Un acto de entendimiento, que exprime la corresponden-
cia que se halla, entre los objetos,” Gracián, Agudeza, 1, 55.
33 Parker, Polyphemus and Galatea, 96 n. 47.
34 For additional information and analysis of Gracián’s work, see T. E. May, “An
Interpretation of Gracián’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio,” Hispanic Review 16.4
(Oct. 1948), 275–300; T. E. May, “Gracián’s Idea of the Concepto,” Hispanic
Review 18.1 (Jan. 1950): 115–41; Parker, Polyphemus and Galatea,” 8–50; and my
“Rhetoric, Wit, and Art in Gracián’s Agudeza.” Although I would now make
some modifications in this article written thirty-five years ago, I stand by its
major claims about the work. Other earlier English language treatments of
Gracián will be discussed in Chapter 5.
35 Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1654; Venice, 1682); https://
archive.org/details/ilcannocchialear00tesa.
36 See J. W. Van Hook, “‘Concupiscence of Witt’: The Metaphysical Conceit in
Baroque Poetics,” Modern Philology 84.1 (Aug. 1986): 24–38, for a wide-ranging
analysis of several Italian treatises on wit of the seventeenth century that does,
not, however, take the Spanish Gracián into account. Van Hook follows
Tesauro in seeing the metaphor as an essential component of the baroque
conceit, but he thinks it serves important cognitive functions not well defined
in most formalist twentieth-century analyses of metaphysical conceits.
37 Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 48 n. 1.
38 See Parker, Polyphemus and Galatea, 47–48, for a succinct comparison between
Tesauro and Gracián that finds the latter more original and convincing. He
too sees Tesauro’s attempt to focus on the metaphor as more restrictive than
helpful.
42 The argument of Katrin Ettenhuber, “‘Comparisons Are Odious’?,” to the
effect that Donne’s contemporaries would have thought of what tradition has
called metaphysical conceits as forms of catachresis, would in this context be
seen as one of a number of possible rhetorical labels rather than a unique one.
46 Benjamin, Origin, 172–74. Such a view was consistent with his mystical theory
of language, first proposed in his youth, to be discussed in the next chapter.
47 The connection of emblem books to Metaphysical poetry is of course a well-
developed idea in the literature on Donne and the Metaphysicals. See, for
example, Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London, 1939;
1947), 2 vols.; Ruthven, The Conceit, 33–38; Barbara Lewalski, Protestant
Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton
49 Herman Cohen, Asthetik des reinen Gefühls, 2, System der Philosophie, 3
(Berlin, 1912), 305; quoted in Benjamin, Origin, 177.
50 Rainer Nägele, “Dialectical Materialism between Brecht and the Frankfurt
School,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David. S.
Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 152–76.
51 “[The] image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
1999), Convulute N (“On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”),
N3, 1, 462. While this passage discusses the crucial case of the connection of an
older work with later readers (see Chapter 1), the idea of an image containing
two dialectically conflicting meanings is also a condition of the baroque image
as discussed in Origin.
54 Ettenhuber, “‘Comparisons Are Odious’?,” 405–6.
55 The quoted text is the translation of the Latin original given in John T.
Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (Garden City, NY: Double-
day Anchor, 1967), 369. The translator is unknown. Quotations below from
The Songs and Sonets are from this edition and are identified by title in the text
or in a note.
56 I was alerted to these images and two of the biblical allusions in the paper of
Robert W. Reeder, “Seeing Double in Donne’s Devotions: Two Serpents, Two
Adams and Two Interpretations of Station 10,” presented at the annual
meeting of the John Donne Society, Baton Rouge, LA, Feb. 26–28, 2015.
57 Beatrice Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54–72; 70.
59 Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,” 67.
60 See Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), who writes: “The parting between body and soul
is . . . the great subject of Donne’s writing” (2); and Guibbory, “Donne,
Milton, and Holy Sex,” 110 and throughout for a much fuller discussions of
the issues involved. Targoff thinks that Donne’s view of the union of body
and soul is not precisely the same as Aristotle’s in two passage (22, 56–57), but
she sees them as closely connected in another (59). Her point is that he is not
philosophically consistent but uses different conceptions at different points in
his work in his complex explorations – a position I agree with.
61 The classis account is in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 24–41.
62 See Christopher Warley, Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and
Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 102–20, for a theor-
ized close reading that gives important emphasis to the poem’s opening
description of a virtuous man’s peaceful death.
63 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
64 Charles Monroe Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1937), 98–99.
65 Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völken, besonders der
Griechen, 1, Thiel 2 (Leipzig: Darmstadt, 1819), 66–67; quoted in Benjamin,
Origin, 165.
66 The OED does not cite this poem in its entry, but it does state in meaning 3a
that the word is “Used by mystical writers as the technical name for the state
of rapture in which the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation,
while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of divine things.” The first
example of this meaning, however, dates from 1652 in an allusion to such an
experience by Plotinus. The overall entry does not allude to the obvious
possibility of sexual ecstasy, but it does mention extreme emotion as part of
the connotations of the word in several usages.
67 Targoff, John Donne, 9–12, notes that Donne is not consistent in his use of
this theory, but it does occur more than once.
68 See, for example, Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Marcus Dods, The Works of
Aurelius Augustinus, ed. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh, 1871–76), X, 11.17–18;
excerpted in The Essential Augustine, ed. Vernon Bourke (New York:
Mentor-Omega, 1964), 76–78.
69 Cf. Targoff, John Donne, 62–63, for a discussion of literary antecedents for
this idea.
70 Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsman (Paris, 1928), 61–68.
71 See my treatment of Montaigne and this essay in Hugh Grady, Shakespeare,
Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from “Richard II” to
“Hamlet” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 109–25.
72 See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 154–87, for an analysis of the play along these lines
using Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory.
5
The Metaphysics of Correspondence or a

Fragmented World?
Baroque Poetics in the Seventeenth Century

And man least knowes their trade, and purposes.
– John Donne1
In the aftermath of the peak of the Modernist Donne, as academic
criticism attempted to come to terms with the scandal of an unaccountable
three-hundred-year-old Modernist poet, it pursued a general strategy that
has subsequently reappeared in our own time: a deemphasis on how
readers in the present experience a work of the past and a shift to trying
to understand it in a reconstructed historical context. It is the nature of the
historical context, rather than the general strategy, that has changed in the
interim. In the 1950s one such attempt that got some attention for a while
was Joseph Mazzeo’s theory that behind Donne’s poetics of surprising and
unusual metaphors (or fragmented allegories in Benjamin’s terms) were
medieval and early modern assumptions of universal correspondences,
with the correspondences seen as an objective quality of the universe,
rather than as an outcome of ingenious and “false” correlations forged in
an act of imagination by the poet. Such a cultural framework, Mazzeo
argued, was the secret of Metaphysical wit and the Metaphysical conceit.
Mazzeo’s idea initially attracted some interest. The idea had been briefly
described by René Wellek in his classic 1946 account of the baroque,
which I discussed in Chapter 1.2 And it was still in the air when critic
K. K. Ruthven wrote in his little book on the conceit in 1969:
In the seventeenth century God was well-known for his wit. His analogic-
ally structured universe was the work of a mind habituated to discordia
170
concors and by no means averse to the occasional catachresis; and students of
that syllabically inspired masterpiece The Holy Bible, found ample evidence
there of the Holy Ghost’s fondness for puns and paradoxes. 3
The tongue-in-cheek quality of this should be evident and is evidence that
Ruthven, at least, thought Mazzeo’s bald idea was in the twentieth century
more a curiosity than a significant critical datum. And he wrote a little later
in the same book, “Mazzeo has produced an attractive and plausible theory
which is very hard to prove on account of the predominately empirical
nature of English poetry in this period and the scarcity of contemporary
commentaries on literary theory.”4 This seems to have expressed some kind
of consensus, since afterward references to Mazzeo become scarce. He was
casually dismissed, for example, in a 1986 discussion of baroque poetics in
Continental wit treatises.5 Ultimately, he was refuted by that most devas-
tating of all critiques, being ignored. But the debate opens up issues that are
still worth discussing. Ruthven, for example, goes on to observe that it is
not at all clear that Baltasar Gracián (to whom I will return below) makes
up for that missing English commentary, as Mazzeo had claimed.6 Indeed,
I want to argue in this chapter that Ruthven’s suspicions were correct, and
that Gracián has moved beyond the idea of a metaphysics of correspond-
ences and into the realm of aesthetics. In fact, the issue of the epistemo-
logical groundwork of the “Metaphysical conceit” or baroque allegory will
lead us back into Walter Benjamin’s own views on language, which
surprisingly converge with some of the assumptions made by Gracián in
his wit treatise. And these assumptions, I believe, can also be detected in
Donne’s poetry through an analysis of the structure of imagery of some of
the religious poems – a demonstration that will conclude this chapter.
I also raise this long-forgotten debate now as a way of reintroducing into
early modern studies a larger topic that has become neglected in the recent
emphasis on specific materiality in today’s criticism: the issue of intellec-
tual frameworks – something like the epistèmes defined by Foucault many
years ago. In my view one of the most useful ways of getting at them is the
kind of retrospective analysis of the construction of intellectual modernity
over the course of the Renaissance, an analysis that would need to
acknowledge the realities of contingency and coincidence, as well as
broadly determining trends and factors like the internal logic of capital
development and the rise of the national state and state sovereignty. The
Age of Donne seems to me to be near the “take-off” point of capitalist,
scientific modernity, that moment when it becomes a self-sustaining,
complexly interconnected system.7 The works of Donne and the theory
of Walter Benjamin are both important resources in understanding the
cultural dynamics associated with this development. And I will argue that
the seventeenth-century work on baroque poetics by Spanish critic and
moralist Baltasar Gracián can serve as a bridge between Donne’s era and
Benjamin’s work on the culture of the baroque and can serve to renew our
efforts at understanding the intellectual as well as the social, political, and
economic contexts of Donne’s work. While there is a cultural divide
between Donne and Gracián at one level, they seem, we will see, to live
in very similar aesthetic-poetic worlds.
The Idea of a Metaphysics of Correspondence

Joseph Anthony Mazzeo made his case for a metaphysics of correspond-
ence in two autonomous but related articles, both published in the 1950s
and reprinted in a collection of his essays in 1964. There was a third essay
specifically on Donne’s alchemical imagery, whose relation to the other
two I will discuss below.8
The earliest essay, “A Seventeenth-Century Theory of Metaphysical
Poetry” (1951), surveys, summarizes, and synthesizes a series of Continental
treatises on wit poetry that had been published in the course of the
seventeenth century.9 His approach is to see all the treatises as more or
less intertextual (but with different emphases) and to extract a “theory of
metaphysical poetry” from the commonalities. He situates the new work
within a crisis of depletion that he believed Renaissance humanist theories
of poetry were undergoing in the sixteenth century. The humanists had
ransacked Aristotle’s poetics and its central doctrine of poetic mimesis, and
they had by the beginning of the next century largely exhausted it, leading
to a perceived need for new theories. In a poetic climate featuring the new,
flamboyant, and decidedly nonclassical poetry of Giambattista Marino
(1569–1625) in Italy and Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) in Spain, with their
elaborate, often obscure and difficult tropic practices referred to as concetti
in Italy and conceptos in Spain, the theorists turned to exploring the bases
of such new poetic practices by investigating a cluster of interrelated
concepts, the most important of which were (giving the Italian first and
the Spanish second): acutezza or agudeza (“wit” or “acuity”), ingegno or
ingenio (“wit,” or “the creative mind”), and concetto or concepto (“conceit”
or “witty mental perception”). Mazzeo uses Donne for examples and sees
his poetry as connected to these issues, but clearly the Italian and Spanish
writers of the wit treatises did not know his works.
Mazzeo believes that these new theories achieved important results that
“helped effect the liberation of poetry from a narrow conception of
subject-matter and of rules, placing more emphasis on those aspects of
poetic creation included in the concept of maniké”10 – that is, the form of
madness (or poetic furor) discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus and made much
of by Renaissance neo-Platonic theories of poetry. But Mazzeo notes that
generally the wit theorists remained faithful to Aristotle in other ways, but
shifted attention away from the concept of mimesis in the Poetics to the
emphasis on the importance of metaphor in the Rhetoric. As indicated,
they also attempted to synthesize Aristotle with neo-Platonic theories of
divine inspiration. The result was a shift of attention from subject matter
to form, and the new theorists were keen to conceptualize the new witty
tropes, especially metaphors, found in the works of their contemporaries.
Here Mazzeo turns briefly to Baltasar Gracián and his implied separation
of the mental acts creative of conceptos from those at work in logic and
rhetoric. He finds similar ideas in the other theorists such as Matteo
Pelligrini and Emanuele Tesauro and sees this as an anticipation of a later
Enlightenment aesthetic theory, a step toward a more fully developed
theory of the autonomy of art from the neoclassical requirements of a
strict imitation of nature – though it was not an idea clearly and consist-
ently applied. Mazzeo summarizes his findings this way:
It is clear that the tractates do not represent a “Copernican revolution” in
poetic theory or criticism and the conscious attitudes of the theorists
certainly do not indicate such a tendency. The tractates agreed with
tradition in many essentials and were intended as guidebooks for poets,
but were to be used as such with the largest liberty. From a different point
of view, the tractates do seem to be rough drafts of a later poetic to the
extent that they foreshadow some of the conceptions of eighteenth-century
idealistic aesthetics.11
It should be noticed that Mazzeo’s attempted synthesis of the wit theorists
leads him to a noticeable neglect of many of the differences among them.
And although it is not evident from the above summary, he relies most
heavily on Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale artistotelico and ignores its
differences from Gracián’s Agudeza. And this leads to some of the more
problematic aspects of his next related article based on his study of the wit
treatises, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence” (1953),
which was his most influential essay.12
This article is the site for what became his best-known thesis: that
underlying the baroque poetics of the early to mid-seventeenth century
were assumptions of the world as a “metaphysical” poem and God a
“metaphysical” poet,13 assumptions that the baroque poets (including the
English Metaphysicals) followed in their pursuit of witty poetry. In this he
was making an observation similar to an earlier one in Italian by Mario
Praz in his essay “The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the Baroque,”
which had first appeared in an Italian journal and in the Italian language in
1925 but was not published in English until 1958.14 Both writers provide
memorable descriptions of the idea, and both draw considerably from
Tesauro, who appears to give the fullest development of the concept of
the world as full of conceits; Mazzeo also cites Sforza-Pallavicino’s 1631 Del
bene for a version of the idea that connects the network of correspondences
to Homer’s golden chain.15 But Tesauro is the main source for the
idea both in Mazzeo and in the passages on the idea in Praz’s essay,
“The Flaming Heart.”
Several critics picked up on this or reinvented it on their own.16 In
retrospect it seems parallel to a milestone, highly influential, and later
discredited work in Shakespeare studies, E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Eliza-
bethan World Picture, but perhaps Tillyard’s ideas in the 1950s were so
much a part of critical consensus that no one needed to make explicit the
connection of Tillyard's Elizabethan world picture to the theory of the
metaphysics of the conceit.
Certainly, however, there were differences. Tillyard’s “world picture”
was fixed, static and, as he explains it, derived from medieval thought. It
entailed a synthesis of “Plato and the Old Testament, invented by the Jews
of Alexandria and vivified by the new religion of Christ.”17 To simplify a
bit for the sake of concision, it described a hierarchical world connected by
the Chain of Being that Arthur Lovejoy had described in the 1920s, with
three main levels: the macrocosm or the heavens, the polity or kingdom in
which humans lived, and the microcosm of the individual human; some-
times the choirs of angels in heaven were included. These levels (and other
subdivisions) “corresponded” with each other in the sense that the com-
ponents at similar points in the overall hierarchy could be connected
through their parallel points in each hierarchy, and in the sense that the
different levels interacted with each other and influenced each other, as in
astrology.
In an example Tillyard gives from Shakespeare, Mark Antony in the
famous quote from Antony and Cleopatra is described as follows:
his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above
The elements they lived in.
Tillyard then claims, “The passage loses half its meaning unless the
reference to the dolphin as king of the fish is understood. Antony stood
out in regal fashion above the revels he delighted in like the dolphin, king
of the fishes, showing his back above the waves.”18
For Mazzeo and Tesauro, in contrast, the correspondences are anything
but fixed and traditional. They are products of the poet’s acutezza in the
sense of her creative perception and thinking. For Tesauro the poet is
discovering an intellectual link that God had created by mirroring the
divine thought process, but there is definitely a measure of human ingenu-
ity involved, and the correspondences of acutezza were seen as modern and
original.
But as the quotation from Tillyard on Mark Antony and the dolphin
shows, the idea of the "world picture" also contained specific political
meanings. It justified and “naturalized” the system of monarchy by
positing that it was part of the very fabric of the universe instituted
by God. Every hierarchy had its top position – even the fish, as we have
seen. The King was at the top of the human hierarchy, and any other
system was unnatural. Tillyard himself recognized this ideological func-
tion, but only in passing. Later critics saw his work and its great influence
for about twenty years as a product of a culturally conservative movement
in Shakespeare studies against various other, less conservative approaches.
Culturally, it was clear from some of Tillyard’s other writings that he was
doing the best he could to undermine the influence of two of his
iconoclastic New Critical Cambridge colleagues, William Empson and
F. R. Leavis.19 On a more substantive level, it became increasingly
clear that Tillyard had greatly underestimated the various intellectual
challenges to this worldview in the Renaissance, amply represented in
Shakespeare’s plays and elsewhere, such as Machiavellian Realpolitik and
Montaigneian skepticism. His main thesis, that the world picture was
more or less universally shared in the extended Elizabethan period, could
not really hold up under investigation. The critical consensus turned
against him starting in the 1970s, a trend that accelerated in the following
two decades.
Were Mazzeo’s essays related to Tillyard’s political, cultural, and intel-
lectual projects? Substantively, his idea of the “universal analogy and
correspondences” was, as we have seen, distinct from Tillyard’s except at
a very general level and drawn in its details mainly from Emanuele
Tesauro’s treatise. It was Tesauro who claimed that God was a ‘“witty
creator, an arguto favellatore, a witty writer or talker.” For Tesauro,
“Thunder is really nothing but an acutezza of the mixed type, picture
and motto together, and the whole of nature speaks in conceits.” And
Tesauro wrote that the sky is a vast cerulean shield, and God is the first
conceptista poet.20 Mazzeo then generalized this into his claim for a perva-
sive seventeenth-century “metaphysics of the conceit.”
The Politics of the Metaphysics of Correspondences

How this issue might fit into a political ideology is very much an open
question, though some political-minded critics of the early 1990s saw the
baroque style as intimately connected, at least in Spain, with the absolute
monarchy and the power of the Catholic Church.21 And as for Mazzeo’s
views on the twentieth-century critical wars between New Critics and
historical critics, he draws from both sides. He was content to take his
account of the structure of a Metaphysical poem from leading American
New Critic Cleanth Brooks and then pursue a path in the history of ideas
charted in part by the philosophical-historical work of Ernst Cassirer.22 In
short, Mazzeo does not line up easily in the critical debates between
historicism and formalism in the mid-twentieth century.
What is perhaps clearer, however, is the connection to leading Modern-
ist ideas, expressed especially by T. S. Eliot, of the Elizabethan age and
early seventeenth century as a golden age of authentic meaning and unified
sensibility. In this, if not in other ways, the Metaphysics of Correspond-
ence is similar in function to Tillyard’s Elizabethan world picture: both
imagine a time when the world is already conceived poetically, not dissoci-
ated as it would be by the rise of Cartesian, Baconian, and Lockean
conceptions of the world as inert and open to technical manipulation.
The world in this view is already aesthetic, and poetry is much more easily
available, as it were, to its practitioners.
But other critics investigating the poetics of correspondence placed it in
different cultural and (implicit) political contexts from those of either
Tillyard or Mazzeo. Writing about the same time as Mazzeo (and from
the United Kingdom rather than the United States) and drawing from
both Tesauro and Gracián, S. L. Bethel positioned himself in his own way.
In the introduction to his contribution to the premier number of The
Northern Miscellany, “Gracián, Tesauro and the Nature of Metaphysical
Wit,” Bethel identifies his interest in these non-British sources as in league
with Rosemond Tuve’s attack on the New Critical, Modernist Donne in
her 1947 Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. He in fact praises Tuve
“with the deepest gratitude for what will surely prove to be one of the
formative books in a revival of orthodox criticism.” But to those who
suspect Bethel here perhaps protests too much, satisfaction comes when it
devolves that, according to Bethel, for all her perspicuity Tuve hasn’t
gotten the Metaphysicals quite right, and it is now up to him to overcome
this embarrassing situation by bringing attention to the Continental wit
theorists Gracián and Tesauro. This leads to a fairly detailed summary of
the ideas of each, though he finds Gracián to be confused in his organiza-
tion (as Croce had) but excellent in a number of pithy aphorisms.23 As
for Tesauro, he is less interesting in his examples (many contemporary
Latin-language poets), but he is more systematic and accordingly better
organized, according to Bethel.
But in the end the two are conflated to produce a list of nine theses
meant as a guide to how a seventeenth-century thought system might have
understood the wit poetry of its age, including, for Bethel, John Donne as
well as Góngora and Marino.24 As we will see below, I think that while
they share many ideas and concepts, Gracián is finally the more reliable
theorist of the two, so that the conflation that Bethel (like Mazzeo before
him) undertakes can be misleading. For example, Bethel’s first point is that
conceits are founded in metaphor, but this is Tesauro’s rather than
Gracián’s idea. He says wit is distinct from rhetoric, but this is much
clearer and more systematic in Gracián than in Tesauro. And he claims
that “the remote terms of a conceit are objectively related,” in the sense of
objective properties of nature25 – a claim more or less accurate for Tesauro,
who bases his idea of the objective on nature and the mind of God, but
much less so for Gracián, who, as I will argue below, derives his from
language.
Gracián’s Correspondences
In Baltasar Gracián’s Spanish treatise on wit from 1642 (revised 1646),
Agudeza y el arte de ingenio (Wit and the Art of Ingenuity), there is a
markedly greater emphasis on the role of human creativity in wit than in
Tesauro. Indeed, one of the great merits of Gracián is precisely his
by-passing the issue of a metaphysics of correspondence of the sort that
Tesauro, and his twentieth-century interpreters Praz, Mazzeo, and Bethel,
had emphasized. In Gracián the role of the Divine Mind is never
mentioned, except perhaps for the implication that the human mind that
finds these wonderful correspondencias between unlikely objects is itself a
product of divine creation. But the effective agent of wit in Gracián is
defined by the word that he uses in his title: ingenio – “ingenuity,” or “wit”
in that sense, but also “genius,” with some connotations recalling the
word’s Latin source genio, famously used by Horace in his Ars Poetica to
designate the native talent or genius of the poet as opposed to what can be
learned from ars (art or technique).26 And he is explicit – and prescient of
Kantian aesthetics – in his claim in the final sentence of his treatise that the
fourth and final (Aristotelian) “cause” of wit is “el arte”: art itself. The term
arte had not yet taken on its eighteenth-century associations with the
aesthetic (a word yet to be coined) but retained its Renaissance meaning
as a set of skills associated with the production of something practical.
What makes this prescient of later aesthetic theory is, among other things,
the idea that the art is undertaken for its own sake, rather than seen as a
tool used for something larger.27
This attention-grabbing ending had been well prepared for in the first
sections of the treatise, where Gracián had elaborated a Baroque/Symbolist
synesthetic aesthetic theory, one also developing classic notions that beauty
is a product of symmetry and proportion. Gracián defines an art of wit
based on finding such proportions (the Latin word used to translate the
Greek analogia, which applies both to the proportions of both architecture
and of mathematics)– – although as noted in Chapter 4, he allows for
symmetries based not only on similarities but also on opposites. He says
this is analogous to the proportions and symmetries of painting and
architecture, the harmonies of music, and even the gustatory play of the
apparent opposites sweetness and sourness, the picante and the mild, in
cooking.28
He makes a further distinction, not always emphasized by his commen-
tators, by distinguishing between symmetries formed from within the
traditional “adjacents” (cause, effect, properties, contingencies, connec-
tions, and so on) of the subject – that is, the commonplace associations
of any subject based on heuristic lists recommended in rhetoric textbooks
under the topic of inventio – and those that involve an “alien term” (término
extraño) not to be found in the usual commonplace links of the subject.29
The traditional metaphor (often taken to be the basis of all conceits) is in
effect only in those cases when such an “alien term” is used by the poet.
One clarifying example is an excerpt from a romance by Luis de
Góngora:
Extremo de las hermosas
Y extremo de las crueles:
Hija al fin de sus arenas
Engendradoras de sierpes.30
(Extreme in beauty
And extreme in cruelty:
Daughter finally of her sands
The engenderers of serpents.)31
In a brief commentary, Gracián tells us that the wit of this passage derives
from the correspondences or “proportions” formed among the subject and
her attributes – in this case between “ella cruele y su patria, madre de fieras y
víboras” (“the cruel she and her country, the mother of beasts and
vipers”).32 The only formal metaphor at work at all in the passage is the
commonplace one comparing the poetic subject, as “daughter,” to the
implied mother, her home country. It is hardly Johnson’s discordia concors.
For Gracián, the wit derives instead through the parallels formed by the
“attributes” of the subject, her temperament and her homeland.
Donne is no stranger to this kind of wit, although it is most easily
accessible in the Epigrams rather than in the Songs and Sonets. Consider for
example (and one could cite several more) the one entitled “Hero and
Leander”:
Both rob’d of aire, we both lye in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drownd.33
Here, it is in the parallels formed by the commonplace materials (the
opposites and identities, the four elements) that cause wit, not any kind of
metaphor. This is also similar to the wit described above in the “bare”
baroque images (discussed in the previous chapter) of “The Jeat Ring Sent”
and the verse letter “To Mr. George Herbert, with one of my Seales, of the
anchor and of Christ.” The potential symmetries in all cases are “there” in
the traditional rhetorical materials, but it takes a special mental act, one of
agudeza (wit or acuity), entendimiento (understanding), and/or ingenio to
raise the commonplace to the level of a newly defined art form, the art of
ingenuity. By making wit a matter of raising traditional rhetoric to a
new level, Gracián underlines its human and heuristic qualities without
reference to any supposed metaphysics. It is, he says, a new kind of art,
which takes rhetoric as its subject matter and imposes a new form on
rhetoric, creating a higher art of wit. And he claims that the mental effort
involved “raises us to a rank beyond our proper one” and is “the work of
cherubim, and an elevation of man.”34 That is to say, Gracián sees the art
of wit as similar to the angelic power of immediate intuition theorized by
medieval theologians. Later theorists would recategorize that idea into one
about the special qualities of aesthetic perception.
Benjamin and Gracián

Of these three theorists (one twentieth-century, the other two seventeenth-
century) of the correspondences supposedly underlying Metaphysical
wit (Mazzeo, Tesauro, and Gracián), it is Gracián whose ideas resonate
most meaningfully with Benjamin’s view of the baroque world – even
though there are also profound differences between the two as well – above
all Gracián’s retention of a classical and neoclassical view of beauty as
dependent on symmetry and an implied aesthetic unity, both quite con-
trary to Benjamin’s picture of the baroque.35 There is to be sure a
“moment” within Benjamin’s thinking on language that corresponds to
some of Tesauro’s ideas about a metaphysics of correspondence, but as we
will see, this notion exists only in the form of a shattered past within the
fragmentary baroque world that is at issue here.
The early, idealist Benjamin posited a world permeated by what he
called “communicability,” a spiritual power that echoed God’s own
language and was common to all things.36 In this he paralleled Tesauro’s
seventeenth-century ideas of a universe permeated by divinely instituted
correspondences. But following themes of both German Romanticism
and kabbalistic Jewish traditions, he argued in the conclusion of this
essay that after the Fall, language lost its Adamic perfection, creating the
“human word.” This word, he states, “must communicate something
(other than itself).”37 In his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he
followed up on this insight to build on it some aspects of his theory of
allegory, holding that language was radically fallen and alienated from
its original connections to the divine, producing a world of fragments.
“If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy,”
Benjamin writes in a passage I quoted previously, “if melancholy causes
life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure,
then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power.
That is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or
significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the
allegorist.”38
Ironically, given Gracián’s status as a Counter-Reformation Jesuit
writer, he was less overtly theological than Tesauro (also a Jesuit) in his
approach to the art of wit poetry. Instead, he, grounded poetic perception
in the structures of language. John Beverley, developing an idea initially
expressed by British Hispanist A. A. Parker, sees Gracián as having
developed in effect an “antifoundationalist” theory of the conceit because,
like other baroque writers and artists, he had come to recognize in effect
the “nonreferential, generative properties of language” that Noam
Chomsky called “Cartesian linguistics.”39 The wit of agudeza is autono-
mous and self-constituting – just like, Beverley adds, absolutist political
power.40 An art of witty correspondences is possible precisely because
language is disconnected from things themselves. The final cause of the art
of wit is the art itself, as Gracián wrote.
Beverley’s insight connects Gracián with Benjamin’s own “antifounda-
tional” theory of language – inspired in part by Jewish mystical traditions
that assert that God created language and Torah before he created the
world so that language is actually prior to things – even in a fallen world in
which since the expulsion from Paradise and the destruction of the Tower
of Babel, individual human languages have evolved that have greatly
distorted (though not entirely lost) the divine language’s direct connection
between signifier and signified. I will return to this issue below.
For now suffice it to say that these ideas provide much of the back-
ground when Benjamin theorizes the cultural situation that underlies
baroque aesthetics: the baroque empty world of incipient modernity,
which deprives objects of intrinsic meaning and opens them up to use as
allegorical counters. As discussed above (see Chapter 3), in his Trauerspiel-
buch he defined this cultural condition as caused in Germany by the
Reformation and Counter-Reformation, specifically by the devaluing of
“good works” in Lutheranism and in the emphasis on the Church Militant
as a ruling institution of present times in post-Tridentine Catholicism.41
Gracián, living as a Jesuit in Counter-Reformation Spain, seems to take his
cultural/religious situation completely for granted and treats baroque
poetics, as we have seen, as an extension to a new level and new art form
of the pragmatic art of rhetoric, and he goes on to catalogue all the possible
variations of wit creation he can imagine. In effect he is constructing from
the kind of cultural fragments that Benjamin saw as the atoms of baroque
poetics. And Gracián’s final point, that all this is done for its own sake, for
the sake of the art, demonstrates how much he is working within a closed
system of his own creation, his own version of Benjamin’s baroque empty
world being filled up with allegories that both devalue and elevate the
world of objects. Baroque art for both of these theorists is no longer strictly
speaking mimetic; instead, it creates its own world in an abstracted
aesthetic space, building in sonnets pretty rooms. For each, poetry no
longer is a mimetic mirror but has become a visionary lamp constructed
from an autonomous language – one of the surprising parallels of the
baroque with a Romanticism with which in other ways it is at odds.42
In short, just as Gracián saw language as an autonomous realm in which
the mind plays, so Benjamin sees language as alienated from the true –
albeit it is the fundamental means by which a reality that resists our
attempts to capture it completely in knowledge nevertheless allows for a
meaningful representation of the world in and through which we can carry
on our lives. Language is the way we conceptualize the appearances of
things.43 And the language of our fallen state is fundamentally ambiguous
and open to interpretation, just as it if for Gracián. We live not in a world
of objective correspondences but in a fallen world – one that requires and
generates an allegorical vision for the world’s representation and
comprehension.
The Abandonment of the Metaphysics of Correspondences

There is no better piece of evidence for the insufficiency of the theory of
the Metaphysics of Correspondence as an underlying condition for
seventeenth-century poetry than the sequence of reprinted essays to be
found in Mazzeo’s 1964 collected essays, Renaissance and Seventeenth-
Century Studies. Earlier I summarized his two essays on the issue of the
supposed metaphysics and referred to a third, which treats Donne’s poetic
imagery, specifically images taken from alchemy. But the title of this third
essay is nothing like what one might expect as a follow-up to the previous
two – say, something on the order of “John Donne and the Metaphysics of
Correspondences.” It is instead the much more modest “Notes on John
Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” and the content of the article is similarly
constrained. As a way into the issue of Donne’s mental universe, Mazzeo
decides that he will concentrate on what he takes as allusions to Paracelsus
and two of his major concepts, the idea of the Balsamum, a bodily
substance that naturally heals the body unless it is weakened or interfered
with, and the idea of the quintessence, or fifth element, which Paracelsus
(and others) believed to be the secret unifying substance of creation – at
once the key to spiritual perfection and the transmutation of base metals to
gold. It was at other times and in other forms also called the elixir and the
philosopher’s stone.44 Mazzeo also gives examples of Donne’s use of the
image of the limbeck (the alchemist’s still), the specular stone (thought to
be a kind of prism), and the peculiar Paracelsian idea of the homunculus or
artificial man.
The article surveys several instances of Donne’s use of these images and
ideas and cites material from three nineteenth-century studies of early
modern alchemy as glosses to Donne’s allusions. The phrase “Notes on”
very much conveys the feel of the discussion. Only at the very end of the
survey does Mazzeo turn to the idea of “universal analogy” behind his
earlier theory of the Metaphysics of Correspondences, claiming that it was
“an almost unconscious habit of thought by many of the thinkers of
Donne’s time.” We might note that this claim has been reduced from
that argued earlier, which had seen a universe of correspondences as a
constant subtext of all Metaphysical poetry. In this modified version,
Mazzeo argues that because of the “almost unconscious” mental habit of
the time, “there is no reason why he [Donne] should not have been able to
accept the theory and practice of alchemy without any qualms.”45 But then
Mazzeo goes on to show, judging from passages scattered throughout his
works, that Donne was quite skeptical about alchemy, as in the claim
(mentioned in a previous chapter) from “Loves Alchemy,” “Oh, ’tis
imposture all.” He falls back on the idea that Donne valued alchemy as
a spiritual discipline but also recognized that it could be and was used by
con men to gull the foolish.46 His conclusion is: “There is no statement in
Donne’s work giving a definite opinion of the Hermetic Art,” but Mazzeo
indicates that he believes Donne clearly was interested in it and alluded to
it often. But he does so, Mazzeo decides, “as a true poet [having] an
aesthetic rather than an intellectual interest in ideas. He used ideas without
much regard for what we would call their truth value but for whatever
value they may have had for evoking emotions, expressing attitudes and
states of mind, and illustrating the moral truths revealed to faith.”47
This diagnosis that Donne uses his esoteric lore aesthetically rather than
philosophically is, as I have noted in passing previously, perhaps the most
repeated of all the observations about Donne’s use of scientific or philo-
sophical knowledge and lore over several decades of Donne studies. And it
is in strong contrast to a passage in the opening sentences of S. L. Bethel’s
1953 article, “Gracián, Tesauro, and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit”:
“Two things, however, I could never believe: first, that Donne was indif-
ferent to the truth of the philosophical propositions he employed, and –
much more important – that he did not intend to express universal truths
in his poetry.”48 It was in seeking to prove these beliefs that Bethel turned
to the seventeenth-century Continental treatises on wit and their supposed
philosophy of universal correspondences. And in the absence of any
statement from Donne on the issue, he turns in his conclusion instead
to Donne’s “The Flea,” with its “triumphant display of the subtle beauty
with which certain remote terms, the equation of blood and life, lovers, a
flea, a temple, are related, objectively and significantly, though not logic-
ally; for the flea is a valid symbol, though not a proper basis for logical
argument.”49
Mazzeo, who went much further into the nature of the treatises,
eventually discovers that it is impossible to sustain the position that such
conceits display an objective analogy inherent in nature, or that this is the
(repetitive) truth content of Metaphysical poetry – whether in Gracián or
in Donne’s poetic practice. Instead, he finds, as so many others, Donne’s
embrace of a pervasive skepticism and a resulting sense of a fragmented,
disjointed intellectual world. Donne expresses this idea himself (albeit in
the form of his overall poetic allegory) in the passage from The First
Anniversary I used as an epigram for this chapter. In it, he is explicit that
in the poetic space of the decaying world that fills up that poem of
mourning, the idea of universal correspondences is an obsolete one,
belonging to a defunct golden age – much as Benjamin claimed for the
case of Adamic language in his “On Language as Such” essay:
And man least knowes their trade, and purposes.50
What the wit treatises help us see in “The Flea” and elsewhere in Donne’s
work is not a set of universal correspondences but the creative power of
wit, of ingegno/ingenio. The actual arguments are perfect examples of an
observation of Tesauro’s, that witty arguments are always counterlogical,
or in Bethel’s translation of the Italian, “arguments urbanely fallacious,” by
way of a “certain caviling fiction.”51 The poem is, rhetorically, a speech act
of seduction inserted in the fictional situation of a dialogue between an
importuning male lover and a silent but active female listener. It is another
poem centered on an object, though this time a living one in the form of
the flea that performs the mingling of the blood of the couple and thus
signifies in this context the desired sexual union of the two – a kind of
fragmented allegory in itself.
Then the speaker elevates the poetic and representational complexity by
taking this emblem into fantastic, visually surrealistic territory in claiming
that
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met,
And cloystered in these living walls of Jet.52
The ingenious linkage is clearly based not on any naturally occurring
correspondence, but rather on an act of high wit, further developed in
the immediately following claim that the woman’s apparent threat to kill
the flea with her fingernails would amount to the “three sinnes” of killing
the speaker, killing herself, and the sacrilege of destroying the sacred
temple of their marriage. The exuberance of this comes from the extreme
dexterity of the fallacious argument made through conceptos de proporción
between the mingled blood and sexual union.
It carries over in the final stanza, inaugurated when the importuned
woman crushes the flea between her nails and thus punctures all the
correspondencias artificiosas. Undaunted, the ingenious speaker, after first
trying to regain the advantage by taking her to task for cruelty for shedding
innocent blood, finally grants her silently made point:
Yet thou triumph’st, and saist that thou
Find’st not thy selfe, nor mee the weaker now.
Then comes his famous reversal,
’Tis true, then learne how false, feares bee;
Just so much honor, when thou yeeld’st to mee,
Will wast, as this flea’s death tooke life from thee.
This is also urbanely fallacious, inasmuch as it equates the notion of the
(highly socially consequential) honor of virginity with the fantastically
created realm of artificiosas conceits. It also allows for another, and more
serious interpretation, an argument that “honor” is a social construct
within language just as much as are the equivalences of fleas and sexual
union – a proposition perhaps more evident to a twenty-first-century
reader than to an early modern one, but certainly appropriate within
the emptied world of natural history of the libertine poems. And, as
I noted in Chapter 3, “The Flea” can be seen as belonging to that group,
despite its striking parallels with the rapturous two-in-one assertions of
“The Extasie.”
Finally, its own highly autotelic formal structure signals for us the
creation of an alternate and ultimately aesthetic space that is part of
baroque poetics as well. This manifests primarily in the poem’s almost
obsessive allusions to the idea of “threeness.” It has three stanzas, each of
nine lines (three times three) and each ending with a rhyming triplet
typographically set off from the first six lines (two times three) of the
stanza. It evokes the threeness of the man, woman, and their union as a
kind of emptied, secularized trinity in a mode of high playfulness.
This combination of an emptied world of natural history brings us
squarely back to the theories of Walter Benjamin. As we will see, there is
a “correspondence” between Gracián’s idea of the ingenio’s creation of
conceits and Benjamin’s notion of a mimetic faculty inherent in humanity,
which I will discuss below. As suggested previously, both theorists see
language itself, rather than the nature of the universe, as furnishing the
material for the production of correspondences.
Benjamin’s Theory of Mimesis and Language

The nature of language was a constant preoccupation for Walter Benja-
min, from his earliest youthful essays, through his Trauerspielbuch of the
1920s, and into his Arcades Project in the 1930s. As mentioned briefly
above, at age twenty-three he began his thinking about the issue immersed
in Romantic and Jewish theological ideas about language in a highly
original and at times opaque early essay, the 1916 “On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man.” In the course of his mental and spiritual
evolution, he rethought many of its issues but also retained certain of its
central ideas even into his work as a cultural materialist thinker in the
1930s.53 The work I have been concentrating on, The Origin of the German
Tragic Drama, was, according to Hanssen, a turning point in his thinking
on the subject, and I will turn to it shortly. Benjamin wrote that work still
immersed in the idealist and theological tenets of his early writings. But in
the course of working on it, he had encountered the Bolshevik activist
actress Asja Lacis, who greatly interested him in the possibilities of a
Marxist and avant-garde aesthetic.54 Perhaps consequently, The Origin is
more historically grounded and less theological than the earlier writings.
It is, Benjamin would later say, “already dialectical, if not yet materialist.”55
In the early essay he outlined a theory of language developed out of
both Jewish traditions and German Romanticism, especially influenced
by the works of the German Romantic Johann Georg Hamann
(1730–88), who had already united these two tendencies. Benjamin’s is
a mystical and even theological theory, which holds that “[t]he existence
of language . . . is coextensive not only with all the areas of human mental
expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent,
but with absolutely everything. There is no event or thing in either
animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of
language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental
contents.”56 And he goes on to insist that this assertion is not to be
understood metaphorically – and that “[l]anguages . . . have no speaker, if
this means someone who communicates through languages.”57 As noted
briefly above, this mystical theory shares something with the Metaphysics
of Correspondences argued for in the seventeenth century by Tesauro.
But as Benjamin goes on and historicizes his thinking, we will see that
this moment of universal communicability becomes for him a utopian
one, no longer obtaining in human history.
Human language can be distinguished from “language as such,” Benjamin
asserts, in that it expresses itself through words: this ability produces the
unique “linguistic being of man,” the creation of a split between signifier
and signified. And through the name, “the mental being of man communi-
cates itself to God.”58 As the argument develops, Benjamin shifts attention
to human languages, arguing that no specific human language has priority
over another, that all are imperfect, deviations from “the paradisiacal
language of man [which] must have been one of perfect knowledge,
whereas later all knowledge is again infinitely differentiated in the multi-
plicity of language.”59
This early essay also contains one of Benjamin’s key notions, the idea of
“naming” as the most profound activity of human languages:
The quintessence of this intensive totality of language as the mental being
of man is the name. Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through
him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself
communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the
lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic
being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them –
in the name. God’s creation is completed when things receive their names
from man, from whom in name language alone speaks. 60
In this activity, man-the-namer is the direct recipient of a divine power
through a divine gift, figured in the biblical creations story as the breathing
of spirit into the clay figure out of which Adam is constructed. As
Benjamin puts it, “In man God set language, which had served him as
medium of creation, free. God rested when he had left his creative power
to himself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became
knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is the
creator.”61
While elements of this early, mystical linguistics continued to influence
Benjamin’s thinking as he aged, he modified his theoretical framework in a
series of stages over the years of the rest of his career. Beatrice Hanssen
sums up this process as follows:
But, for all the methodological and ideological approaches Benjamin
espoused over the years, his writings on language as a whole displayed a
remarkable unity; they all enacted – performed – an unwavering critique of
rationalistic, instrumentalist, or aestheticizing conceptions of language and
rhetoric in the medium of language. Whether he embraced a language
mysticism informed by the kabbalah and Hamann, admired Mallarmé’s
poesie pure as the illumination of language’s magical side (in his early years at
least), or supported Brecht’s materialist conception of a language of
gestures, Benjamin did not cease questioning the reduction of language to
a handy tool, to the instrumentality of logic and discursivity, or to the
technical view of linguistics.62
His rejection of Saussure’s and others’ attempts to understand language
through value-free, scientific methodology as well as his critique of ordin-
ary ideas of subjectivity give his views on language a certain kinship with
Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Both cast doubt on the status of
speech and writing as the unmediated, direct expression of an author, and
both see language as having an autonomy of its own and of being
fundamentally open to a plurality of interpretations.
There are also similarities in Benjamin’s mystical theories to Heidegger’s
idea of Being manifesting itself (rather than being manifested through a
subject perceiving it). There are also similarities to Heidegger’s concept of
language as the “House of Being.” Both Hannah Arendt, in her widely read
introduction to Illuminations, and George Steiner, in his influential intro-
duction to the English translation of the Trauerspielbuch, noted other
points of comparison with Heidegger as well.63 But, as Hanssen argued
in a longer, book-length meditation on Benjamin’s language and related
issues, “Throughout his writerly career . . . Benjamin made great efforts to
differentiate his thought from the German philosopher’s [Heidegger] . . .
It is then precisely because of the uncanny points of convergence between
Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s thought – evident, for example, in their
common project of overcoming the shortfalls of humanism – that it
becomes all the more urgent to mark off their deep-seated difference.”64
Fallen Language
Viewed from the point of view of his later development, these notions
constitute the utopian moment of the theory of language. The dialectic
between mourning and redemption is as crucial here as it is in all of
Benjamin’s cultural theories. We need to keep in mind that it is in its
“fallen” form that language is at work in the allegorical form of baroque
art. Precisely as language gets estranged from both divine language and the
natural language of things in the terms of his early work – and in the
reifications of modernity in his Marxist-influenced writings – the condi-
tions for allegory are created. In The Origin, these themes are significantly
historicized, so that the series of alienations creative of early modernity
become more important than the old Judaic themes of Benjamin’s youth.
In effect, the themes of a naturally communicative universe echoing its
divine source are refunctioned in the “materialist” Benjamin as a myth,
creating the “golden-age effect” usefully defined some time ago by Fredric
Jameson.65 The alienations of one’s present creates a desire for the end of
alienation through integration, and this desired state is projected onto the
past, creating an imaginary but productive idea of a golden age. In The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, the idea of pure language continues, but
it is located in the past, and the tendency toward reticence about its
religious significance is clearly noticeable. Benjamin appears to be moving
toward a secular version of the notion as previously described.
In the opening pages of the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of The Origin,
the term “pure language” does not appear, but a related concept does: the
novel notion (for Benjamin) of the Platonic Idea, in the assertion that there
is a realm of truth that is by definition unified.66 In asserting this,
Benjamin is keen to stake out a differentiation of truth from “knowledge”:
“Truth, bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas, resists being
projected, by whatever means, into the realm of knowledge. Knowledge
is possession.”67 But truth is self-representation and necessarily unified.
Truth exists in a form that is very much like Plato’s Ideas. For both
thinkers, “Ideas are pre-existent,”68 just as language as such and the divine
language itself were preexistent in Benjamin’s youthful essay.
With the theology muted through the use of Plato, the convergence of
these ideas with a host of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
critiques of scientism comes to fore, although the link with Plato is
original, and the evocation of an idea of truth seemingly anti-Modernist.
But as the argument develops, these primal ideas in a realm of truth
become more remote, accessible only through the partial representations
provided by intentional “concepts.” Benjamin thus presents a kind of
rewriting of Kantian epistemology by positing an area of “truth” (like
Kant’s noumena) and posing the issue of how human knowledge relates to
it. The truth is foreign to the concept, he argues, since the concept is
“determined by the intention inherent in the concept,” and “Truth is
an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas.”69 As the argument
further develops for the specific cases constituted by the baroque allegory,
language manifests in its “fallen,” not its paradisiacal state.
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the fallen nature of language
sets the stage for allegory, while secular periodization obscures the religious
origins of the ideas, emphasizing the effects of Reformation and Counter-
Reformation on aesthetics. This creates, according to the argumentation of
The Origin, “the gaze of the melancholic man,” which in turn “does not
concern itself with the emotional condition of the poet or his public, but
with a feeling which is released from any empirical subject and is intim-
ately bound to the fullness of an object.”70 The baroque allegory is thus
created.
This particular form of allegory is an allegory of modernity, which,
Benjamin says, came into existence in the sixteenth century and was
dominant for much of the seventeenth.71 It was an era, as I have empha-
sized, dominated by a melancholic sense of an empty world, a vision that,
as we have seen, Benjamin also refers to as “natural history,” a vision of
history as “a petrified, primordial landscape” in which “everything that,
from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is
expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head.” 72 In conclusion,
Benjamin asserts: “It is by virtue of a strange combination of nature and
history that the allegorical mode of expression is born.”73
As mentioned previously, among the most significant practices that
manifested the spirit of allegory in art, Benjamin argues, were sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century attempts by humanist scholars to understand and
translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, which involved them in a kind of de facto
allegory-making.74 Another was the vogue for emblem books alluded to in
the previous chapter. Baroque allegory was also, as we saw, a contradictory,
reactive product of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, of the
development of instrumental reason in Renaissance figures like Machiavelli
and Bacon, and a new prominence in daily life of commodities and
commodification.
But, demonstrating the transitional nature of The Origin in Benjamin’s
trajectory from theological mysticism to historical materialism, Benjamin
near the end of the study announces that “a critical understanding of the
Trauerspiel, in its extreme, allegorical form, is possible only from the higher
domain of theology.”75 A few pages later, he references the fall of language
he had described in his “mystical linguistics” of 1916. But he also sees one
aspect of allegory as created by the persistence of Greco-Roman mythology
into the Christianized medieval and Renaissance cultures, when the
ancient gods became allegorical figures of open-ended meanings, but still
constituted a “province of idols and of the flesh.”76 Accordingly, the
allegorical vision is weighted down by guilt and melancholy:
Guilt is not confined to the allegorical observer, who betrays the world for
the sake of knowledge, but it also attaches to the object of his contem-
plation. This view, rooted in the doctrine of the fall of the creature, which
brought down nature with it, is responsible for the ferment which distin-
guishes the profundity of western allegory from the oriental rhetoric of this
form of expression. Because it is mute, fallen nature mourns. . .. The more
nature and antiquity were felt to be guilt-laden the more necessary was their
allegorical interpretation, as their only conceivable salvation.77
To summarize: it is this fallen, fragmented, allegorical world that is
characteristic of the enveloping structure of John Donne’s poetry, rather
than the unified, cosmically harmonious world of a Metaphysics of Cor-
respondence that earlier critics had posited. To be sure, in several places in
his writing besides The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin alluded
to a version of the Metaphysics of Correspondence posited by Mazzeo and
May in formulations not all that distant from Tesauro’s. For example, in
his important if brief essay from 1933, “Doctrine of the Similar,” he wrote,
“As is known, the sphere of life that formerly seemed to be governed by the
law of similarity was much larger. This sphere was the microcosm and the
macrocosm, to name only one version of many that the experience of
similarity found over the course of history.”78
But here, as in The Origin, the era of microcosm and macrocosm is
assigned firmly to premodernity, with the Renaissance and baroque eras
seen as transitory in this regard. Benjamin thought that the idea of
correspondences retreated, as it were, into the demiworld of the occult
and survived through such singular figures as Emanuel Swedenborg, from
whom it was transmitted and became aestheticized in Romanticism – and
especially in Baudelaire’s poetics of correspondences as displayed in the
celebrated lyric “Les Correspondances,” with its famous opening lines,
“La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de
confuses paroles.”79
Baudelaire and Donne

In his later work on Baudelaire and the “high capitalism” of the nineteenth
century, Benjamin argued that Baudelaire had in effect reinvented the
allegorical method that he had defined in his Trauerspielbuch: “Baudelaire’s
genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius . . . This
poetry is no hymn to the homeland; rather, the gaze of the allegorist, as it
falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man.”80
But he thought that the revival of method was a profound expression of
the genuinely new, indeed unprecedented, world of commodity capitalism
that Baudelaire inhabited. In such a world, as Susan Buck-Morss put it,
Everything desirable, from sex to social status, could be transformed into
commodities as fetishes-on-display that held the crowd enthralled
even when personal possession was far beyond their reach. Indeed, an
unattainably high price tag only enhanced a commodity’s symbolic value.
Moreover, when newness became a fetish, history itself became a manifest-
ation of the commodity form.81
She goes on to discuss Benjamin’s treatments of some of the Belle Epoque
innovations displaying this commodification: the panoramas, the arcades,
the world expositions, and the new rhetoric of progress in politics.82 In
such a world of “phantasmagoria” – the world of illusions created by the
workings of a nineteenth-century magic lantern and used by Benjamin to
reference the illusory spectacles great and small created by the reified
commodity culture of the day83 – Baudelaire had invented a new poetry
that mirrored in its forms the commodity world itself, but also profoundly
protested against it by his poetics of the flâneur. This was a figure who
walked as the alienated man among the dazzling and empty objects of the
Arcades and of Paris and chronicled the spiritual and social crisis they both
caused and manifested.
There is a parallel with Donne’s situation, but great differences as well,
based on the nature of the societies and cultures of each poet. It is not that
the commodity form was absent from Donne’s England. Any number of
recent early modern studies have traced its impact in Shakespeare and
several other writers, for example.84 In my own earlier work, I showed
how major Shakespearean tragedies – Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello,
and King Lear – indicted an amoral world seen as reified from meaningful
human agency and under the control of a series of reified systems: a
Machiavellian politics encoding autotelic power struggles, a commodity
economy operating autonomously and undermining traditional values, and
the separation of rationality in several forms from religious frameworks.85
Donne lived in the same world Shakespeare did, albeit experiencing it
from a significantly different social viewpoint and never presenting a social
critique as brilliantly searing as in Shakespeare’s masterpieces. Donne’s
satires certainly display a keen critical spirit in regard to the court and
town, but they are far from the level of Shakespeare’s satirical plays. But as
I have stressed in my analysis of The Anniversaries and The Songs and
Sonets, Donne’s work, too, represents an emptied world by using the
scattered fragments of which he constructs his poems and chronicles.
To be sure, Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire is so specifically attuned to
the minutiae of nineteenth-century Parisian life that fruitful parallels with
Donne are limited, despite the long tradition, briefly discussed in Chapter 1,
of linking these two poets – both before and after the greatly influential
remarks on the subject by T. S. Eliot.86 What can be said is that both, in
Benjamin’s terms, are highly allegorical poets – but for different reasons.
Donne is the poet of the breakdown of the traditional intellectual
construct of ancient and medieval European premodernity. Commodifica-
tion certainly plays a part in Donne’s social milieu, but it is reflected
indirectly in his poetry. While Donne, it might be said, commodified his
own intellectual skills in a desperate bid for employment after his career-
destroying marriage, his poems circulated not so much as commodities but
as tokens in a social network of mutual support. The only exception to
this, and it is an ambiguous one (it is as much social ritual as economic
transaction) is constituted by the set of poems written to actual and would-
be patrons, power- and wealth-holders who needed to be complimented
and kept satisfied.
But this is a form of commodification (if it is one) far different from that
of the world of nineteenth-century Parisian publication. It is even signifi-
cantly less commercial than was the situation of the theatrical world
inhabited by Donne’s contemporary Shakespeare. The allegorical structure
in Donne’s poetry develops less as a function of a commodified world than
as an outcome of a deep intellectual crisis. Donne and Baudelaire are
connected, but as separated generational stages in a genealogy of the
changing social situation of lyric poetry in Western modernity rather than
as mutually mirroring parallels.
The Mimetic Faculty

As Benjamin became more interested in reconsidering his early, mystical
theory of language in the light of his growing interest in Marxism, he
formulated the idea of an innate human “mimetic faculty” that had been
manifested in premodern ways of organizing the cosmos. But it survived
within modernity in the occult (especially astrology), in religion, and in art.
“The Doctrine of the Similar” (cited above) was his first attempt at
formulating these ideas, and he then produced a rewritten version, in
which the connections to his earlier theory of language were even more
muted, in “On the Mimetic Faculty,” written later in 1933.87 But in both
versions, he emphasizes how the mimetic faculty manifests itself quite
differently over the ages, noting especially its growing “fragility” in the
“perceptual world . . . of modern man.”88 And in both versions, he sees
language itself as the highest expression of the mimetic faculty, with the
connection between signifier and signified one of “nonsensuous similar-
ity.”89 The connection between the sounds of language and its written
symbols displays another example of this nonsensuous similarity. That is
one reason Benjamin devoted pages in The Origin to discussing
onomatopoeia in some of the German plays, highlighting the seventeenth-
century interest in and theorizing about Egyptian hieroglyphics, and dis-
cussing the poetics of the emblem books that were contemporary to the
Trauerspiele in Germany (as they were to Metaphysical poetry in England).
All of these cultural practices manifested the structure of unity/disunity
that is characteristic of allegory, and he links the allegory to the fallen
nature of language, not so much (as he had done as a young man in 1916), as
in Jewish tradition, referencing the expulsion from the Garden and the
Tower of Babel, but rather, as we have seen, in targeting the development
of instrumental reason, the alienation from nature, and the rise of violent,
value-free Machiavellian politics that he associates with the development
of early modernity. Susan Buck-Morss summarizes the transformations
succinctly, from the earlier Judaic themes into the later Marxist ones:
The Fall that alienates nature from human beings describes accurately the
production of commodities in its historical particularity – as Marx’s early
texts make clear. Similarly, the Biblical loss of the language of Names
identifies the essence of abstract labor that characterizes this production.
The devaluation of the old nature that found expression in Christian
allegory is experienced sui generis by Baudelaire in the marketplace, where
the meaning of commodities is not the act of their creation, but their
extrinsic and arbitrary price. Satanic qualities of death and eternal recur-
rence coalesce around this commodity world as fashion.90
In his later work Benjamin saw the continuation of these transformations
not only into Baudelaire’s urban poetry but also into the twentieth-century
dramas of Strindberg and Brecht. Others have connected them to Post-
modernist aesthetics.
There is thus, in the development of Benjamin’s thinking on language, a
moment, as it were, of Tesauro and a moment of Gracián. Like Tesauro,
he saw in his 1916 essay on language (and later works based on it) a cosmos
of universal communicability, latent with the possibilities of correspond-
ences. But like Gracián (even in the early essay) it is language itself that
forms the underpinnings that make possible the correspondences of the
baroque and the Symbolist. Later, as he begins to become more the
materialist, he emphasizes language in its historical development within a
complex of cultural, technological, ideational, and political developments.
Language for Benjamin has certain constant qualities, as Beatrice Hanssen
argued in a passage I quoted above, but they change in development in the
course of human history.
In his theory of the baroque allegory in The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, as I have tried to emphasize throughout, Benjamin conceives of
the baroque as an early manifestation of a developing modernity that,
however, uses as its material fragments from an earlier, now outmoded
perceptual world of microcosm and macrocosm. That is why the theory
works so well as a template through which to study the poetry of Donne, a
poetry marked in important part by the melancholic vision of a fragmented
world defined in the baroque era by Benjamin.
I have already shown this baroque vision manifested in the profoundly
melancholic Anniversary poems and, in more complex and variegated
form, in The Songs and Sonets as well. And as we have seen, in a dialectic
that is endemic to the baroque, the melancholic vision also gives rise to its
dialectical opposite, the refuge of utopian vision. It is worth repeating a key
quote in this regard from The Origin, which applies directly to Donne’s
poetry as a whole:
The bleak confusion of Golgotha, which can be recognized as the schema
underlying the allegorical figure in hundreds of the engravings and descrip-
tions of the period, is not just a symbol of the desolation of human
existence. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented,
so much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of
resurrection . . . On the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem.91
In many baroque paintings of the era, Benjamin notes, a bottom area of
unusual and eye-catching realism is contradicted by a top area depicting a
vision of unearthly and impossible architecture, signifying heavenly
redemption.92 This is, in a broad, Benjaminian sense, an allegorical struc-
ture of a nonsimilar/similar relation of “substitution.” This is also the
structure of Donne’s The First Anniversary, and it is visible underneath the
apparent contradictions in the three modes within The Songs and Sonets of
a world of emptied nature, of direct mourning and melancholy, and of
redeeming, utopian love. It is also manifested in the ambiguity of the
baroque image.
While I have tried for reasons of convenience and focus (and my own
predilections) to concentrate on the secular poems, it might be time now
to look briefly at how this structure also manifests in Donne’s later
religious poetry.
Baroque Structures in the Religious Poems

It comes as no surprise, of course, that in his religious verse Donne uses
many of the same techniques he had explored and demonstrated in his
secular poems. This is another of the most repeated observations made
over the years by Donne scholars, and it is hard to contest. But these
poems differ from the earlier ones in bringing into them a new perspective,
a vision of redemption in an afterlife affirmed and imagined much more
vividly in the religious poems than in the secular ones. This gives some of
them the shape of the baroque paintings to which Benjamin alluded. Take,
for example, two of the greatest of the Holy Sonnets, “At the round Earths
Imagin’d corners” and “Batter my hart,” as well as in the longer lyric
“Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward.” The two sonnets each have two
layers, as it were, one like the bottom of a baroque painting, depicting the
realities of the world that we know; the other presenting an imaginative
vision of a transformed reality permeated with the divine. “Goodfriday”
presents a triple vision (a structure also found in some baroque paintings)
by invoking the celestial mechanics of the Ptolemaic theory of the heavenly
spheres in addition.
“At the round Earths Imagin’d corners” presents an opening octet that
many commentators have called Miltonic in its grandeur. The first four
lines are cinematic and kinetic, imaging four angels announcing the Last
Judgment with their trumpets as “numberless infinities” seek their aban-
doned bodies:
At the round Earths imagind corners blow
Your trumpets Angels, and Arise Arise
From Death you numberless infinities
Of Soules and to your scattered bodyes go.93
It is a visionary, utopian moment of a universal reversal of death intoned in
magnificent cadences and artful enjambed lines. And it is a moment
undercut in two ways. First, there is the arresting reference to “the round
Earths imagind corners,” which inserts the vision into a work of art, a map
even, that distorts the three-dimensional structure of the earth into a flat
representation and underlines the act of imagination (in the Renaissance
sense, suggestive of nonreality) behind the vision. Second, the last four
lines of the octet, the select catalog of the many treacherous causes of
human death over the centuries – “Warr, dearth, age, agues, tyrannyes, /
Dispayre, Law, Chance” – remind us of the realities of human life as we
know it now as a realm of baroque melancholy.
The concluding sestet picks up this note of melancholy and brings us
back to the personal situation of the sinning speaker’s doubts about
salvation:
Here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good
As if thou hadst Seald my pardon with thy blood.
The concluding couplet also strikes a dissonant note: the central Christian
doctrine of Christ’s redemption through blood sacrifice is made into a
counterfactual (with the counterfactual status implicitly ironized), while
the act of repentance is prayed for but not yet performed.
In a 1986 article, Ferenc Zemplényi found this poem to manifest an
“ironic frame” giving the whole work an ironic structure.94 But seeing the
poem in the tradition of baroque allegory suggests a related but somewhat
different interpretation. Neither the impassioned vision of resurrection and
redemption nor the strong element of doubt and skepticism is negated.
Rather, they coexist in a fundamental ambiguity, like the top and bottom
of certain baroque paintings.
We can see something similar in the much discussed and quintessen-
tially baroque “Batter my hart.” It is structured as a Benjaminian frag-
mented allegory, three related situations, each an imperfectly connected
“substitute” for the next, all addressed to God, all invoking violence, but in
different ways and degrees.
It is thus structured (but not rhymed) like a Shakespearean sonnet, three
quatrains and a closing couplet, going against the grain of the Italianate
rhyme scheme and without a thematic octet and sestet structure, even
though the rhyme scheme suggests one. This form previews the poem’s
structural ambivalence.
The first quatrain has long been interpreted as asking God to act
the tinker, violently repairing an unidentified vessel figuring the speaker
and/or his heart. Already there is a central paradox – “That I may rise and
stand, orethrowe mee, and make mee new”95 – as there is in each of the
other two subdivisions. The next set of interconnected images compares
the speaker to “an vsurp’d towne, to another due,” and allegorizes Reason
as God’s “Vice-roye in mee . . . / But is captiu’d, and proues weake or
vntrue.” There is a strong discontinuity between the image sets, the first
suggesting something wrong in the inner essence of the speaker that
requires a drastic remaking, the second suggesting a self inclined to do
right but for an imperfect or traitorous faculty of Reason – although they
both suggest the speaker’s sense of personal inadequacy.
Finally and most powerfully comes the sexually charged final set of images:
Yet dearly I loue you, and would bee loued faine
But am betroath’d vnto your enemye.
Divorce mee, ’vntye, or breake that knott againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I,
Except you inthrall mee, neuer shalbee free
Nor euer chast except you ravish mee.
These images constitute a third fragmented allegory, this one describing an
eternal triangle, with the speaker assuming a traditional feminine role of
passivity and submission through an engagement or marriage to God’s
“enemye.” The fervent prayer that concludes this powerful, complex
sonnet is a series of masochistic requests, climaxing with the sexual fantasy
of a desired rape.
This is undoubtedly the poem chief among those that have led so many
critics to remark on Donne’s propensity to describe the love of God as a
sexual experience in the religious poems and sexual relations in the secular
poems as religious experiences. There is of course a long tradition of
mystical poems using similar strategies; and usually at this point references
to Bernini’s great “St. Teresa” statue are not far away.
What I want to stress here is the way the poem – unlike, say, the
allegorical, erotic poem “Ascent of Mt. Carmel” (Subida del Monte
Carmelo) that initiates The Dark Night of the Soul by San Juan de la
Cruz – describes not a mystical experience per se, but rather the fervent
desire for one, with the poem’s language creating an undercurrent of
violence and force that creates a disturbing subtext of coercion and pain:
batter, knock, orethrowe, bend your force, blowe, burne, divorce, vntye,
breake that knott, imprison, inthrall, ravish. And while the middle subdiv-
ision of the usurped town does not yield verbs for this list, it too contains a
divided rationality that presents a different version of the opposing mean-
ings. The poem, then, shows the structure of baroque images, fundamen-
tally ambiguous and undecidable.
There are similar baroque ambiguities and suggestions of a fragmented,
melancholy world in a longer related example from Donne’s religious
poetry, “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward.” Donne’s “mimetic faculty,”
the innate human ability for finding similarities among the objects of
perception theorized by Benjamin, is vividly on display here as elsewhere
in his work, along with an explicit macrocosm-microcosm interaction:
Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey.96
Obviously, this is an evocation of one of Donne’s favorite cosmic themes,
the motion of the seven traditional planets (including the sun), each
embedded in a crystal sphere, in Ptolemaic movement around the earth.
Each planet is moved both by the overall motion of the Primum Mobile
and by an individual Intelligence (an angel in Christianized versions).
Donne evokes one of the peculiarities of the Ptolemaic system in its
attempts to explain the irregular movements of the planets in relation to
the fixed stars. Mars was a particular problem, often reversing its motion
over weeks and then resuming its original direction – an effect we now
know to be a result of the speedier earth’s overtaking Mars in its own orbit
around the sun. Ptolemy and his successors tackled this problem by
theorizing “epicycles” – the planets moved in circles embedded within
the larger circles of their overall orbit to explain retrograde motion. Some
of the developments of this theory became quite intricate, including
epicycles on the epicycles in some cases.
Donne alludes to this complex movement and its Ptolemaic explanation
in his description of “the other Spheares, by being growne / Subject to
forraigne motions, lose their owne, /And being by others hurried every
day, /Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey.” Given that Newton’s
theory of gravity is still seventy-four years in the future and that the
allusions to (crystal) spheres supporting the planets are explicit, the most
likely explanation for these assertions is that they refer to the multiple
epicycles’ moving one or more planets in a retrograde direction so that its
“naturall” direction is scarcely in evidence most of the time.
Of special interest is the description and set of images in the microcosm
that correspond to the cosmic images. Far from being one of Tillyard’s
traditional correspondences, the reference is to the speaker’s personal
voyage on horseback, said to share the same retrograde motion as a planet
under the influence of a retrograde epicycle:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
That is, for business or pleasure, the speaker is carried away from his
spiritual goal of Christ’s resurrection, traditionally associated with the East
at daybreak:
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
These lines introduce a third cosmic level, the supernatural region of
divinity and Providence, with a new set of correspondences. The three
levels, as mentioned earlier, are similar to those found in many of the
Italian and Spanish baroque paintings of the era, like El Greco’s magnifi-
cent “Allegory of the Holy League (Adoration of the Holy Name of Jesus)”
at the Escorial,97 with its depiction of hell, earth, and heaven as different
planes of reality in one pictorial space. Like that painting, this poem
encompasses what has been called the “triple hierarchy” of the cosmos
“from ideas in God’s mind down through spiritual intelligences and
heavenly bodies to animals plants and stones beneath the moon.”98 In
Donne’s poem, the third, lower level, however, is the quotidian social life
of humanity rather than nonsocial nature, and the order of influence is
different, in that the poem begins in the celestial spheres rather than the
mind of God (which, however, it in effect alludes to continually in its
second half). In a play on words Donne used before in his works, the Sun
becomes the Son, the latter’s rising and falling seen as figuring the rise and
fall of the redeeming Christ on the cross. The following lines continue
defining this new, third level of meanings, showing the events of the
crucifixion as overthrowing the natural movements of the celestial spheres
with which the poem had begun:
It made his own Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And turne all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes?
The universe Donne describes retains something of the mystical structure
found in, for example, Agrippa’s view of an occult universe alluded to
above. But the correspondences are “witty,” artificiosas ones, rather than
traditional or Tillyardian. They are subjective assertions of a wished-for
unity in a world experienced as fragmented. The universe described is one
full of problems, beginning with the allusions to the wandering stars whose
actual positions in the heavens notoriously defied the attempts of Ptolem-
aic astronomers to accurately account for. The correspondence of this set
of images to the quotidian world describes and attempts (in a sense) to
excuse the self-described nondevotional actions of the poem’s speaker
detained on “Pleasure or businesse” rather than acts of devotion on this
holy day, and these seem as difficult to justify as do the planets’ positions
for Ptolemaic astronomers. The speaker even suggests that it is better for
him not to be able to directly encounter the vision of the act of redemp-
tion, for the unmediated sight of the divine would prove lethal:
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, myst dye.
And he describes his riding westward, with his back toward the symbol of
Christ, as deserving of physical punishment, which he desires:
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee.
The poem consists, then, of three levels and three imperfectly unified
fragmented allegories, with the first two (the celestial spheres and human
daily life) connected in an explicit complex metaphor: the odd, retrograde
movements of the planets correspond to the retrograde movements of the
speaker on Good Friday. The third level – the theological one – is the
utopian moment of the other two, transforming the world of nature
assumed as ordinary in the first two sets of images, referencing a vision
of universal redemption – which, however, remains tantalizingly distant
and separate from the world of the speaker.
The poem’s world is a melancholy one, even in the vision of faith that
informs it throughout; and the speaker (and presumably mankind at large)
is a guilty party not yet redeemed. Even in the religious poems, Donne’s
world seems as “out of joint” as that famously described by the Shakespear-
ean character who comes closest to his melancholy and his skepticism. And
here as elsewhere, Walter Benjamin is one of the best guides to Donne’s
art. Donne’s aesthetics of fragmentation finds one of their most illuminat-
ing critics in the theory of baroque allegory of Walter Benjamin.
Notes
1 John Donne, The First Anniversary: An Anatomie of the World, in John Donne,
The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6, gen. ed. Gary Stringer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), ll. 391–98.
2 René Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5.2 (Dec. 1946): 77–109; 95.
3 K. K. Ruthven, The Conceit (London: Methuen, 1969), 45.
4 Ruthven, The Conceit, 10.
5 J. W. Van Hook, “‘Concupiscence of Witt’: The Metaphysical Conceit in
Baroque Poetics,” Modern Philology 84.1 (Aug. 1986): 24–38, calls Mazzeo’s
theory of a metaphysics of correspondence “attractive, if fanciful” (25).
6 Ruthven, The Conceit, 10–11.
7 For a detailed treatment of these issues, see Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Univer-
sal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 26–57.
8 Joseph A. Mazzeo, “A Seventeenth-Century Theory of Metaphysical Poetry,”
Romanic Review 62 (1951): 245–55; “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of
Correspondence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 14 (1953): 221–34; and
“Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” Isis 48 (1957): 103–23; all
reprinted in Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century
Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 29–43, 44–59, and
60–89. All further references are to these 1964 reprints in book form, Mazzeo,
Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies.
9 The treatises he discusses are Pierfrancesco Minozzi, Gli sfogamenti dell’ingegno
(1641); Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642; rev. 1648); Cardinal
Sforza-Pallavicino, Trattato del dialogo e dello stile (1646); Matteo Pelligrini, I fonti
dell’ignegno (1650); and Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale artistotelico (1654).
10 Mazzeo, “A Seventeenth-Century Theory of Metaphysical Poetry,” 30.
11 Mazzeo, “A Seventeenth-Century Theory of Metaphysical Poetry,” 42.
12 Cf. A. A. Parker, Polyphemus and Galatea: A Study in the Interpretation of a
Baroque Poem (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 47–48.
13 Mazzeo, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence,” 54.
14 Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other
Studies of the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to
T. S. Eliot (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), 204–63; 206. For infor-
mation about an earlier Italian version, see the acknowledgments in the
volume’s unpaginated front matter. Mazzeo mentions Praz in a short passage:
“Sig. Mario Praz finds Tesauro’s conception of the world as acutezze bizarre,
and it might seem so at first glance” (54), and later cites on another matter a
collection of Praz’s essays in Italian, Studi sul Concettismo (Florence, 1946) –
the probable source for his knowledge of Praz’s views of Tesauro. Praz’s first
work on English Metaphysical poetry was Mario Praz, Secentismo e Marinismo
in Inghilterra: John Donne–Richard Crashaw (Florence: La Voce, 1925).
15 Sforza-Pallavicino, Del bene (Milan, 1831), Book III, part 2, chap. 55, 1st ed.
(Rome 1644); quoted in Mazzeo, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of
Correspondence,” 55.
16 Van Hook, “‘Concupiscence of Witt,’” reviews most of the seventeenth-
century Italian theorists of wit (but not the Spanish Gracián). He critiques
all views that baroque comparisons can be understood in terms of a mimesis of
actually existing correspondences, arguing instead that baroque conceits are
always counterfactual, aim at producing a sensation of the marvelous, and are
aesthetic rather than intellectual in effect – albeit they “stretch the epistemo-
logical capacities of the reader by exercising the mental faculties in unfamiliar
ways” and usefully expand the imagination (38).
17 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1944) (New York: Vintage,
n.d.), 4.
18 Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, 35.
19 See Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 158–89, for a discussion of Tillyard’s ideas, his
influence, and the reaction against him.
20 Mazzeo, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence,” 53. In all
the quotations here, Mazzeo is paraphrasing or translating Tesauro, Il cannoc-
chiale artistotelico.
21 See Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in
Counter-Reformation Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1992), for a collection of essays with such views.
22 Mazzeo, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence,” 58–59.
23 For a complex but ultimately cogent and persuasive argument that there is
indeed a coherent organization within the complexities of Gracián’s treatise,
see T. E. May, “An Interpretation of Gracián’s Agudeza y el arte de ingenio,”
Hispanic Review 16.4 (Oct. 1948): 275–300.
24 S. L. Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” The
Northern Miscellany of Literary Criticism 1 (1953): 19–40; 34–36.
25 Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” 23. Bethel
interprets Gracián as holding this view, but the passages he cites in support do
not substantiate it, in my view.
26 I discussed and defined all these terms many years ago in Hugh Grady,
“Rhetoric, Wit, and Art in Gracián’s Agudeza,” Modern Language Quarterly,
41 (March 1980): 21–37. In what follows I am drawing from (but also at times
reformulating and updating) the still relevant discussion there.
27 Benedetto Croce, Problemi di Estetica, 2nd rev. ed. (Bari, 1923), 311–48; cited in
Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” 39 n. 9, had
claimed that Tesauro’s elevation of the role of ingegno in the creation of art
looked forward to later Enlightenment aesthetic theory like Kant’s. Mazzeo,
“A Seventeenth-Century Theory,” 42, saw this role played by all the treatises
he discusses as an ensemble. May, “Gracián’s Idea of the Concepto,” 17, makes
the claim specifically for Gracián; and Grady, “Rhetoric, Wit, and Art in
Gracián’s Agudeza,” 35–37, argued a version of this position based chiefly on
Gracián’s concluding Discurso.
28 Gracián, Agudeza, 1: 53; quoted and translated in Grady, “Rhetoric, Wit, and
Art in Gracián’s Agudeza,” 31.
29 Gracián, Agudeza, 1:114. I discussed this in greater detail in Grady, “Rhetoric,
Wit, and Art in Gracián’s Agudeza.”
30 Quoted in Gracián, Agudeza, 1: 66.
31 My translation; see Grady, “Rhetoric, Wit, and Art in Gracián’s Agudeza,” 25, n. 13.
32 Gracián, Agudeza, 1: 66.
33 John Donne, “Hero and Leander,” in Donne, The Complete Poetry of John Donne,
ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1967), 161.
34 Gracián, Agudeza, 1: 51: “Empleo de querubines, y elavación de hombres, que
nos remonta a extravagante jerarquía.” My translation, in “Rhetoric, Wit, and
Art in Gracián’s Agudeza,” 33 n. 31.
35 Benjamin mentions Gracián in The Origin, 98, but the reference seems to be to
Gracián’s books on the ethics of worldly life like El Héroe (1637), not to his
treatise on wit and the conceit, Agudeza y el arte de ingenio, which Benjamin
never mentions.
36 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”
(1916), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 62–74.
37 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 71.
(London: New Left Books, 1977), 183–84.
39 John Beverley, “On the Concept of the Spanish Literary Baroque,” in Cruz
and Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain,
216–30; 220.
40 Beverley sees this connection as the reason that Gracián could so “naturally”
assume that training in the art of wit would also serve as an intellectual
foundation for statecraft and the art of power (220).
41 Benjamin, Origin, 80 and 138–39.
42 Benjamin had seen this, arguing that the baroque shares certain crucial
properties with Romanticism, via the two aesthetics’ hostility to neoclassicism.
He wrote that “the technique of romanticism leads in a number of respects
into the realm of emblematics and allegory,” referencing in particular the
“children’s nurseries and haunted rooms” of the German Romantic writer
Jean Paul (Origin, 188). Later, he adds, discussing a few passages in which
theories of allegory from the romantic era refer to the affinity of all the plastic
arts to language and writing, “This romantic theory of allegory remains only
virtual, but it is nonetheless an unmistakable monument to the affinity of
baroque and romanticism” (Origin, 214).
43 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 65–74. Similar ideas in less directly
theological terms inform the discussion of language and representation in
the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
27–38.
44 Mazzeo, “Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” 77–79.
45 Mazzeo, “Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” 86.
46 Mazzeo, “Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” 86–88.
47 Mazzeo, “Notes on John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery,” 89.
48 Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro, and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” 19.
49 Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro, and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” 38.
50 Donne, The First Anniversary, ll. 391–98. Emphasis added.
51 Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, 9 (Degli Argomenti Metaforici); quoted in
Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro, and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” 30.
52 This and all subsequent quotations from Donne’s Songs and Sonets are taken
from John Donne, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor 1967), and will be identified by title in
the text or parenthetically.
53 See Beatrice Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54–72, for an excellent overview of
the continuities and changes over his career on his thinking about language.
54 This moment is represented most clearly in Benjamin’s unclassifiable avant-
garde experimental book One-Way Street (1928), with its dedication: “This
street is named / Asja Lacis Street, /after her who / as an engineer/ cut it
through the author” (One-Way Street, in Selected Writings, 1: 444–87; 444).
55 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri
Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995–2000), 4: 18; quoted and translated
in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), 226.
58 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 64–65.
62 Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,” 54–55.
63 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 46, and
George Steiner, “Introduction,” to Benjamin, Origin, 21.
64 Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals,
Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 2.
65 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, The Persistence of Dialectics
71 Benjamin, Origin, 167 and 180.
78 Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar” (1933), in Benjamin, Selected
Writings, 2: 694–98; 95.
79 “Nature is a temple whose living pillars / Sometime let escape some confused
words.” My translation.
80 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Walter
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael
W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), 30–45; 40.
81 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 82.
82 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 82–89.
83 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
1999), 669.
84 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and Theater in Anglo-
American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986); Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lars Engle, Shakespearean
Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in
English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Jonathan Gil Harris,
Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Linda Wood-
bridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
85 Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf.
86 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays
(New York: Harcourt, 1964), 241–50.
87 Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Benjamin, Selected Works, 2:
720–22. Neither version was published in his lifetime.
88 Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 721.
89 Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 721.
90 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 239.
93 John Donne, Holy Sonnets 8 (Westmoreland Sequence), in John Donne, The
Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, 7.1, gen. ed. Gary A. Stringer
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 14. Of the
two versions of this sonnet offered as reading texts in the volume, I choose this
one in line with the editors’ strong argument for reading “dearth” rather than
“death” in l. 6.
94 Ferenc Zemplényi, “Orthodoxy and Irony: Donne’s Holy Sonnet N. 7 (4): At
the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners, Blow . . .,” Studies in English and
American (Budapest) 6 (1986): 155–70; cited and quoted in Donne, The
Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7, part 1: 389.
95 Donne, Holy Sonnets 10 (Revised Sequence), Variorum Edition 7.1: 25. All
other quotations from the poem are from the same text.
96 John Donne, “Goodfriday, 1631. Riding Westward,” in The Complete Poetry of
John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross, 366. Subsequent quotations are from the
same text.
97 Also known as “The Dream of Philip II.”
98 Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3:
Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 518–40; 519. The author is paraphrasing
the cosmology of De occulta philosophia (1533) of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
von Nettesheim (1486–1535).
Conclusion
As I stated earlier in this study, what Walter Benjamin wrote of Charles

Baudelaire can also be said, albeit for different reasons, of John Donne:
“Baudelaire’s genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical
genius.”1 As we have seen, this is not a matter of allegory as typically
defined in manuals of poetic terms, but rather as seen in Benjamin’s
complex usage, which deploys the term in multiple contexts as simultan-
eously a vision, a hermeneutic, and a set of protean poetic techniques. John
Donne’s genius, also nourished on melancholy, is also an allegorical genius
in this sense, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, conceived in
regard to seventeenth-century German Trauerspiele, or “mourning-plays,”
is in many ways also a theory of Donne’s poetic vision and tropes.
The connection comes in large part because of the affinity of each of
the two writers for versions of dialectics. They shared an ability to grasp
the paradoxes involved as binary opposites turn simultaneously into
identities in a dissonant union of opposites. Benjamin encapsulated this
concept and skill in his idea of the “baroque” image and, later, into his
complex concept of the “dialectical image” – both of which he character-
ized at different moments as “dialectics at a standstill,” the idea that one
image encapsulated opposed meanings that never found their moment of
synthesis. Such a structure of resistance to unity is characteristic of the
relation of signifier and signified in the baroque allegory considered as a
trope. And all of these are relevant to our attempts to understand Donne’s
favorite tropes, including the one that has come to be called the Meta-
physical conceit.
The “fit” between Benjamin’s theory and Donne’s practice is not, of
course, a perfect one, as I hope I have made clear. In particular Donne’s
varied exploration and (at times) celebration of sexual pleasure is a topic
more or less untreated in Benjamin’s critical writings – though, as noted
above, it certainly was an important facet of his life.2 One telling example
207
of this occurs in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which I quoted in
Chapter 3. In this passage Benjamin defined happiness as a historically
conditioned state of being, but his examples are perhaps unexpected:
The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we
have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could
have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is
indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.3
Putting aside Benjamin’s point about historical conditioning, the thought

and the feeling belong not only to Benjamin but to Donne’s poetry,
especially the secular poems. Indeed, there are other parallels between
the lives and sensibilities of the two that are worth brief mention by way
of explanation of some of their critical affinity.
Above all, they share the frustrations that come with career failures
and the need to adjust to and accommodate such bad fortune. Donne
famously lost his chance for a career as an advisor at Court through his
imprudent marriage to Ann More. Benjamin failed to secure a tenured
academic position when his The Origin of German Tragic Drama was
judged incomprehensible and even inappropriate for an academic set-
ting by his professorial superiors. Donne eventually recovered a securer
life through his Jacobean religious career, and Benjamin became for a
while, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the best-known independent
literary journalist in Germany.4 All that came to end, of course, when
the Nazis seized power in 1933, and Benjamin became an exile living
precariously off various grants in Paris – until Paris, too, became Nazi
territory and Benjamin died in an attempt to flee to the United States.
In both cases, the bitterness of these experiences lends both an emo-
tional depth and deep investment in the work each undertook in the
difficult periods.
As I argued in Chapter 3, Donne’s sexual explorations are not just
sources of pleasure, but also often dissatisfying, unfulfilling experiences
that are assimilated into the structures of an easily discernible baroque
empty world – when they are not vehicles for utopian expressions of the
possibilities of human redemption that is also one of Benjamin’s great
themes. This is, the biographers tell us, the pattern of Benjamin’s romantic
life as well, with its tempestuous marriage ending in divorce; his deep,
frustrated amorous infatuation with Asja Lacis; and his on-and-off erotic
adventures across Europe.
Donne’s unevenly expressed religious sensibility is also in definite
“correspondence” with Benjamin’s off-and-on relation to what he called
Conclusion 209
“theology” (usually meaning Judaic ideas concerning the God-directed
trajectory of history and the ultimate redemptive potential of humankind).
The scholarly world has now begun to take in the full complexity of his
writings and career, including the role religion played in it.5
In all these ways, Donne and Benjamin are joined as Baudelaire and his
readers are in the opening poem of Les Fleurs du Mal: each is a symbolic
semblable and frère of the other.
Literature and Philosophy

George Steiner’s 2011 erudite tour through two millennia of major texts of
Western philosophy and literature, The Poetry of Thought, gets at the
intellectual core of the connection between the two well, without specific-
ally mentioning either. But Steiner investigates with unusual brio and
follow-through a thought many of us have shared for a long time: that
the greatest philosophical texts always have an aesthetic dimension, while
at least many of the masterworks of the literary canon have a philosophical
one.6 In some sense both crafts are interrelated, and the most ambitious
works within these traditions pursue a common goal that is, however, not
easy to define conceptually.
About two-thirds of the way through what amounts to a long extended
essay, Steiner notes one important commonality shared by philosophers
and literary writers: both groups can be broadly divided into two categor-
ies – the unifiers like Plato, Aristotle, Dante, or Coleridge, and the
champions of fragmentation, like Nietzsche, Montaigne, Adorno, or
Mallarmé.7 It is an interesting dichotomy, and one sees immediately that
such a division is a possibility at the highest level of abstraction of form
itself, so that there is something of a “timelessness” to the distinction. At
the same time, however, it is clear that the cultures of some eras and places
are more preoccupied with unity or fragmentation than others. As Adorno
insisted, form expresses aspects of its immediate cultural context as well as
formality per se.
It is clear, I think, that both Donne and Benjamin are figures who reside
in the gap between literature and philosophy, although of course leaning,
as it were, in different directions: Benjamin is the artist-philosopher and
Donne the philosopher-poet. But the divide is one that defies hard and fast
differentiation. And there is little doubt that both of them belong on the
side of the fragmenters rather than the unifiers – although, as we have seen,
the very idea of fragmentation coexists and interacts with its dialectical
opposite, unity.
Benjamin in particular is clearly a prominent member of the camp of
fragmenters, from his work on baroque allegory in the 1920s through the
final essays of his aborted career that ended with his desperate suicide in
1940. As Susan Buck-Morss wrote, “The allegorical mode allows Benjamin
to make visible palpably the experience of a world in fragments, in which
the passing of time means not progress but disintegration.”8
Donne’s affinity for fragmentation (and its dialectical correlative, a
yearning for unity) is a feature of all his poetic works. It is at the heart
of his lyric method generally. In terms of specific works, it is most
explicitly expressed in his magnificent The First Anniversary: An Anatomie
of the World, through which I began the concrete exploration of Benja-
min’s relevance for understanding Donne’s work. And it persists as a
constant allusion in the more utopian registers of The Second Anniversarie.
His famous Songs and Sonets (which I believe constitutes the portion of
his work that continues to speak most directly to us in the twenty-first
century, as it did to the twentieth), embodies several of the qualities of
baroque literature that Benjamin identified in his study of the baroque, as
I discussed in Chapter 3. Benjamin’s theory also offers insights into the
trope historically called the metaphysical conceit, as I discussed Chapter 4.
Finally, Benjamin’s ideas serve to illuminate the classical critical inquiry
over the issue of the underlying metaphysics – though perhaps the better
term is epistemology – of Donne’s poetic methods and vision
(Chapter 5).
This inquiry and its findings hardly exhaust a topic involving writings of
multiple dimensions and large bodies of work. But I hope I have made a
beginning on which others might choose to build.
Notes
1 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed.
Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), 40.
2 See Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), and Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin, Critical
Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2007).
3 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,
1969), 254.
4 Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), 235–313.
5 Benjamin’s lifelong friend Gershom Scholem is the great interpreter and
defender of the importance of Judaic ideas and beliefs for Benjamin. See
Conclusion 211
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 1981). For an account that, unlike
Scholem’s, argues that it is possible to reconcile Benjamin’s Judaic theology
with his Marxism, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter
Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 228–52.
6 George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New York:
New Directions, 2011).
7 Steiner, The Poetry of Thought, 157–71.
8 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 18.
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Index
Agamben, Giorgio, 33 “Canonization, The,” 87, 126–7,

Anniversaries, The 149–51
date, composition, and printing, 64–6 Carey, John, 40
resistance to unity, 85–8, See also First Colie, Rosalie, 25, 28, 115
Anniversarie, The; Second Anniversarie, The “Communitie,” 114–15
“Apparition, The,” 115–16 conceit, definitions of, 139–43
Aquinas, Thomas, 151 “Confined Love,” 107–8
“At the round Earths Imagin’d corners,” Corthell, Ronald, 46
196–7 creaturely, 107–10, 113–16
Augustine, 112, 158 critical paradigms, 39
Bach, Rebecca Ann, 95 de Man, Paul, 15, 96, 152

baroque allegory, 35, 48–51, 64–5, 68, Deleuze, Gilles, 32, 34, 50, 60, 72
96–7, 99–100, 104, 124, 137, 189–91, Derrida, Jacques, 26, 31, 33, 44, 47, 188
194–5, 207 dialectical image, 6–7
baroque image, 144–6 DiPasquale, Theresa M., 37
baroque, the, 16–32 “Dissolution, The,” 102–3
“Batter my hart,” 197–8 Docherty, Thomas, 45–6, 101
Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 11, 77, 191–3 Donne Variorum Project, 42–3
Belsey, Catherine, 121 Donne, John.
Benjamin, Walter, 1–8, 207–9 amoral sex and, 110
allegorical objects and, 138 astronomy and, 71–2, 81, 152–4,
formalism and, 2–3 198–9
human happiness and, 119 baroque painting and, 195, 199–200
Kabbalah and, 124–5 Baudelaire. See Baudelaire, Charles and
melancholy and, 98–9 critical afterlife and, 8–10
natural history and, 104–5 Feminism and, 36–7
Presentism and, 4–8 idealized love and, 120–2
“substitutions and,” 152–5 misogyny and, 113–15
the mimetic faculty and, 193–5 Montaigne and, 163
Theodor Adorno and, 3, 125, 146 natural libertinage and, 108–9
theory of language, 180, 186–91 New Criticism and, 13–16
Bergson, Henri, 5 New Philosophy and, 70–2
Bethel, S. L., 176–7, 183 Ovid and, 110–11
Beverley, John, 180–1 Postmodernism and, 32–51
Bloch, Ernst, 124 religious poetry and, 195–201
“Broken Heart, The,” 117–18 Renaissance pessimism and, 70
Brooks, Cleanth, 13–15, 22, 26, 126, 141 secularization and, 125–9
Buck-Morss, Susan, 191, 194, 210 Shakespeare and, 72–3, 163
Burckhardt, Jacob, 16, 18 the baroque and, 26–32
226
Index 227
Walter Benjamin and, 2, 77, 119, Manley, Frank, 76
207–9 Mannerism, 23, 27, 58
wit, 69–70, 179, See also titles of individual Marotti, Arthur, 39–40, 43, 46, 94, 120–1
poems; Songs and Sonets, The; Anniversaries, Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 30
The. Martz, Louis, 68, 76, 85
Dryden, John, 9 Marx, Karl, 5, 122
Dubrow, Heather, 3, 41 Mazzeo, Joseph, 170–4, 176, 182–4
Metaphysical conceits, 138–43
“Elegy, Variety,” 105–6 Baltasar Gracián and, 143
Eliot, T. S., 10–12, 141 baroque allegory and, 144
emblem books, 145 Emanuele Tesauro and, 143–4
Empson, William, 13–14, 40, 76, 101, 127, 141 Samuel Johnson, 139
“Extasie, The,” 155–62 Metaphysics of Correspondences, 172–7,
and idealized love, 160 182–6
Modernism/Postmodernism, 37–9
First Anniversarie, The, 66–78
Elizabeth Drury as allegory, 73–7 new materialism, 5
Fish, Stanley, 41 Newman, Jane, 16
“Flea, The,” 183–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5
“Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, A,” 99–101
Galileo, 71, 73, 81
Gardner, Helen, 120, 141–2 Ornstein, Robert, 109
“Goe, and catche a falling starre” (Song),
116–17 Praz, Mario, 19–21, 174
Goldberg, Jonathan, 39–40, 45
“Good Friday. 1613. Riding Westward,” 198–201 “Relique, The,” 86, 127–8
Gracián, Baltasar, 69, 173 Richards, I. A., 13, 15
correspondences and, 177–9 Roberts, John, 26, 30, 36
language and, 182 Ruthven, K. K., 170
Walter Benjamin, 179–82
Greene, Roland, 31, 34 Saunders, Ben, 46
Guibbory, Achsah, 121 Schmitt, Carl, 32–3
Second Anniversarie, The, 78–88
Halpern, Richard, 121 baroque allegory and, 88
Hanssen, Beatrice, 104, 107–8, 151, 186–8 the utopian, 87–8
Haskin, Dayton, 10, 95, 108, 141 Shakespeare, William, 33, 40, 43, 71, 75, 90, 99,
Hazlitt, William, 141 129, 163, 168
Heidegger, Martin, 188 Songs and Sonets, The
Herz, Judith, 137 and a fragmented world, 94–129
libertine poems, 103–10
Jameson, Fredric, 32, 35, 37–8, 129, 189 poems of mourning, 98–103
“Jeat Ring Sent, A,” 146–7 poems of mutual love, 118–29
Johnson, Kimberly, 47–8 thematic groups, 97–8
Johnson, Samuel, 9–10, 139 Steiner, George, 188, 209–10
Strier, Richard, 40, 45
Kahn, Victoria, 33 Sullivan, Ernest, 8–9
“Sunne Rising, The,” 122–3
Lacan, Jacques, 34 Sypher, Wylie, 26–7
Lambert, Gregg, 17, 64
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 34, 50 Targoff, Ramie, 151
Lorenz, Philip, 34 Tesauro, Emanuele, 173–5
“Loves Alchymie,” 113–14 Tillyard, E.M.W., 174–5
“Loves Usury,” 112–13 “To Mr. George Herbert . . .,”
Low, Anthony, 122 147–9
228 Index
utopian, the, 66, 68, 74, 80, 84–5, 89, 105, Warnke, Frank, 23–6
118–20, 122, 124–5, 128–9, 201 Weber, Samuel, 5
Wellek, René, 21–3
“Valediction Forbidding Mourning, A,” 151–5 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 18, 27, 31
“Valediction of Weeping, A,” 123–4 “Womans Constancy,” 111

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JOHN DONNE AND BAROQUE ALLEGORY

hugh grady is Professor Emeritus of English at Arcadia University.

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Acknowledgments page viii

1 Walter Benjamin and John Donne: Constellations of

Conversations with many colleagues were an important part of the gesta-

Walter Benjamin and John Donne

Benjamin, Donne, and the Era of the Baroque

Walter Benjamin’s Presentism

T. S. Eliot: Presentist Critic

Benjamin’s Correction of the Anglo-American Modernist Donne

For us today, Donne’s imagination seems obsessed with the problem of

Brooks then goes on to quote and paraphrase Coleridge’s celebrated

The Baroque and Donne

The Baroque in Anglo-American Literary Studies

The Baroque Comes to England and America

The Baroque in Donne Studies

Multiple Postmodernist Donnes

Aesthetic Paradigms and Critical Paradigms

Some Current Work on Donne

Moving on in Donne Studies

Benjamin, Baroque Allegory, and the Postmodernist Donne

It is in this aspect of Benjamin’s “allegory” that the connection to Donne’s lyric

The Anniversaries as Baroque Allegory

Situating The Anniversaries

The First Anniversary

The movement from “sicke” to “dead” to “putriﬁed” exempliﬁes some-

And then, as the argument continues, this ghostly glimmering is trans-

It goes without saying that this is a fantastic claim to make about a

The references to visual beauty resume below with an allusion to “beauties

The Progres of the Soule

In a poem ﬁlled with so much hyperbole, it is perhaps not to be wondered

The imagery is exemplary of baroque excess and the spirit of Trauerspiel-

The Resistance to Unity of The Anniversaries

The allusion is generally understood to refer to France, where Donne was

Donne’s The Songs and Sonets

The Structure of Baroque Allegory

Spleen et Idéale in The Songs and Sonets

The World in Decay: Poems of Mourning in The Songs and Sonets

It is a moment when the otherwise all-encompassing expressionistic pro-

The Empty World of the Libertine Poems

Love between Ovid and Petrarch

There is a contradictory set of pseudo-commercial activities going on here:

This is a poem that constructs a male audience for itself, constantly

The Counter-Utopia of the Songs and Sonets

Allegorical Objects and Metaphysical Conceits

At one level of analysis, Donne’s Songs and Sonets presents itself to us as a

What Was a Metaphysical Conceit?

Gracián’s and Tesauro’s Treatises on Wit

Benjamin’s Allegory and the Metaphysical Conceit

The Baroque Image and the Conceit

Conceits, Baroque Images, and Allegorical Tropes

Seales, of the anchor and of Christ.” The poem is in eﬀect an emblem

The comparison is emblematic, a description of an object that can easily be

“The Extasie”: Allegorical Form and Technique

Here Donne eschews his favorite allegorical strategy of bringing in some

True to the mystical tradition whose terms Donne is transforming to

Two-in-One and the Baroque

The Metaphysics of Correspondence or a

What Artist now dares boast that he can bring

The Idea of a Metaphysics of Correspondence

The Politics of the Metaphysics of Correspondences

Benjamin and Gracián