John Donne Critical Quotes

“For Donne, the process of examining emotional expereince inevitably produces poetry of contradicitons”

“he turns to the Roman Ovid, rather than imitating the Petrarchan love poetry”

“Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson…Donne adopts different roles and postures”

“Finding the whole of salvation traced in one’s own soul” (Non-Ignatian)

“There are puzzles in his work, but we can solve them all if we are clever enough”

“His love poetry is Hamlet without the prince”

“The love of hatred and the hatred of love”

“The very qualities which make him unsatisfying poetic food make it a valuable ingredient”

“Love is a god and lovers his clergy”

“There are two Donnes: Jack Donne; and Dr John Donne”

“His despair is never without a move towards hope; his hope, never without a move towards despair”

“A continually shifting series of dramatic moments…temporary conclusions…but all only for a ‘moment final'”

“I find nothing more difficult to believe than man’s consistency, and nothing more easy than his inconsistency”

“Love is a kind of warfare”

“The First Sonnet poses the problem that the sequence attemtps to resolve”

dicordia concorsi – “the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”

“Those writers who on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness”

“Genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried in the grossness of expression”

“Instead of writing poetry they only write verse”

“Wit which is at once natural and new…the metaphysicals have seldom risen”

“Confused magnificence that…could not be imagined”

“A development by rapid succession of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader”

“Poets more often named than read”

“Trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling”

“Donne elaborates a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it”

“All poetry is heterogeneous”

Donne ‘purg’d’ ‘The Muses garden’, threw away’the lazie seeds / Of Servile imitation…And fresh invention planted’

“Donne’s love poetry stems from a frustrated sense of power”

“The brilliant abrupt openings…are like the lump of gold flung down on the table”

“The first thingto remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed his faith.”

“The complexities are not riddles to be solved, but natural and unresolvable, like living.”

“He treats argument not as an instrument for discovering truth but as a flexible poetic accessory”

Angels, mummy, mandrakes, maps, coins, and shadows, “they are meeting places for opposites.

“I propose that we describe Donne not as an “apostate” or as a “blasphemer” but simply as a “survivor” of the Elizabethan persecution.”

Carey is a ‘psychobiological critic’ for his reading of, “the Holy Sonnets as if each poem were a versified treatment of an actual event in Donne’s psychological life”

“Don[n]e for not keeping accent deserved hanging.”

“With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, / Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; / Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue. / Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.”

Donne “found no substitute for sense, / To seize and clutch and penetrate; / Expert beyond experience, // He knew the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton; / No contact possible to flesh / Allayed the fever of the bone.”

“that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed’

“wandering between two worlds”

“Donne felt his dependence on God to resemble his dependence on secular patronage”

“imitating neither nature nor life”

“Some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel”

“A rhetorician, not a poet”

“To look at nothing as it really is but only as to what may be thought of it”

“A poet of feeling could never stop to elaborate”

“Devour any kind of experience into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract”

His poetry “admits contrasts and psychological intricacy”

“Donne’s dramatic situations are analytic divorces”

“Love itself is political – involving power transactions between men and women”

“Spenser seeks erudition, and Donne sprezzatura”

“telescoping of images”

“Donne would not have become a Protestant in a Catholic country”

“An argumentative poet”

“Imagined Corners”, “they are meeting places as opposites”

“He attacks convention as castrated and sapless…he presents naked priapism and brags thereby his dangerous integrity”