John Donne In The Nineteenth Century

John Donne was famous in his own time yet was virtually unknown in the eighteenth century. Haskin investigates what happened as Victorian readers, prompted by the enormous popularity of Izaak Walton's biography, began to gradually rediscover the poetry, before showing how Donne came to be seen as the discovery of T. S. Eliot and the modernists.

In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged 'metaphysical' poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having 'discovered' Donne himself. John Donne in the Nineteenth Century tracks the myriad ways in which 'Donne' was lodged in literary culture in the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be 'in the hands of every reader'; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of the only edition ever called The Works, which reprinted the sermons of 'Dr Donne'. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the 'fleshly school' of poets, and by self-consciously 'decadent' writers of the fin de siècle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the seventeenth-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called 'the masterpiece of English biography'.

Contains writings about John Donne from 1873 to 1923, including Henry Morley, Edmund Gosse, W.F. Collier, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Augustin Beers, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and many others. Together these works present a record of how, from the nineteenth century onwards, critics viewed Donne, and how he became part of today's literary canon.

Contains writings about John Donne from 1873 to 1923, including Henry Morley, Edmund Gosse, W.F. Collier, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Augustin Beers, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and many others. Together these works present a record of how, from the nineteenth century onwards, critics viewed Donne, and how he became part of today's literary canon.

Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Collected Poetry reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful songs and sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divine Poems composed towards the end of his life. From joyful poems such as 'The Flea', which transforms the image of a louse into something marvellous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigour into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. His poems remain among the most passionate, profound and spiritual in the English language.

"With the anniversary of Donne's brilliant and difficult Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions coming up in 2024, Elizabeth Harvey and Timothy Harrison's John Donne's Physics is a timely study that provides fresh readings of the Devotions in relation to all of Donne's other writings. Previous scholarship has focused on Donne "the cleric" and the religious, pastoral significance of his work and thought. Harvey and Harrison show us another side of "the pastoral poet": as a thinker immersed in the latest developments in science and medicine of the time, and a participant in debates on natural philosophy and physics of his day. Rereading the Devotions alongside Donne's love poetry, satire, letters, and elegies, Harvey and Harrison shed new light on Donne, on his experience of the 1623 typhus epidemic in London that inspired his writing of the Devotions, and how we might think with Donne during our own pandemic times"--

First published in 1990, this title provides a compendium of useful information for any reader of Donne to have at hand: crucial biographical material, historical contextualisation, and details about his life’s work. The intention throughout is to enhance understanding and appreciation, without being exhaustive. The major portion of the volume, in both importance and size, is ‘A Donne Dictionary’. Its entries are arranged alphabetically: they identify, describe and explain the most influential persons in Donne’s life and works, as well as places, characters, allusions, ideas, concepts, individual words, phrases and literary terms that are relevant to a rounded appreciation of his poetry and prose. A Jonne Donne Companion will prove invaluable for all students of English poetry and Anglican theology.