S. Eliot’s oracular modernist essays, the originality and strength of Donne’s poetry were widely recognized as the mark of his particular genius.5 In his ground-breaking 1921 anthology Grierson observed that the ‘central theme of [Donne’s] poetry is ever his own intense personal moods, as a lover, a friend, an analyst of his own experiences worldly and religious’ – a view of Donne that dominated criticism for much of the twentieth century. The most important theoretical justification came from T. S. Eliot, whose much-cited definition of the lyric as ‘the voice of the poet talking to himself – or to nobody’, maintained that it makes no difference whether the lyric addresses a friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a natural object since the poet only pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: ‘He is not concerned, at this stage, with other people at all: only with finding the right words or, anyhow, the least wrong words. He is not concerned whether anybody else will ever listen to them or not.’ Eliot saw Donne’s poetry as ‘a kind of cypher which will yield clues to a peculiarly interesting personality behind [the] poetry’.6

In the second half of the twentieth century Donne’s poetry came to seem even more intriguingly self-analytical as the biographical identity of Donne, the man behind the poems, gave way to the persona or the ‘identity of the speaker’ (the term is from that catechism of New Criticism, Understanding Poetry, by Brooks and Warren). The dramatic situations, the windows and curtains, the suns and ladies, provided an imaginary backdrop for what really mattered: ‘the conflict of attitudes within the mind of an individual’.7

New Historicism precipitated another major shift in Donne criticism, from the self-contained, coherent verbal construct to the interpenetration of poetry and society. Stressing Donne’s apostasy from his Roman Catholic upbringing, John Carey described Donne as a powerful egotist driven to continual self-advertisement, his professional ambitions thwarted by his clandestine marriage. Arthur Marotti represented Donne as a coterie poet, writing not for print but for manuscript circulation.8 As the world permeated Donne’s satires, verse epistles, epithalamions, funeral elegies and religious writing, the imaginative world of the Songs and Sonnets receded.

Yet even as critical currents shifted, Donne’s poems continued to be seen as a predominantly male undertaking that reduced the woman to a shadowy reflection of male desire or a figure of male exchange.9 Feminist critiques offered explanations: the patriarchal organization of early modern society encouraged Donne’s misogynist wit; the lyric was a monologic and deeply male genre; the very structure of language empowered men by silencing women. Most twentieth-century criticism disregarded the women to whom so many of Donne’s poems were originally addressed.10

Much as the voice of Eliot’s modernist poet speaking to himself morphed into the self-dramatization and self-analysis of the new critical persona, Donne the self-fashioning, self-advertising careerist succumbed to Donne, the self-deconstructing, unstable postmodern subject. With the death of the author, the spread of intertextuality, and the allure of self-reflexivity, the solidity of the poems themselves began to dissolve. Yet, the very process of deconstruction invited constant rereading and reconstruction:

  And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

    We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

    As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs …

                       (‘The Canonization’)11

English Renaissance poetry is rooted in convention, and Donne, like his contemporaries, writes in well-established genres and verse forms: elegy, epigram, satire, love lyric, epithalamion or marriage song, verse epistle, sonnet, hymn.12 Yet Donne constantly turns conventional poetic forms to unpredictable ends. An avid reader who, like the speaker in ‘Satire I’, preferred the ‘constant company’ of his books to gadding about town, Donne frequently invokes the classics, the Bible, medieval philosophy and earlier Renaissance poets, only to distance himself from them. He mocks the futility of the conventional Petrarchan lover, stuck in a stock conceit and frozen in a static love for an inaccessible, heavenly mistress: ‘Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love? / What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?’ the speaker asks in ‘The Canonization’.13

In an era deluged by sonnets, Donne’s love lyrics, although known as Songs and Sonnets, do not contain even one formal sonnet (fourteen lines of iambic pentameter verse in a conventional rhyme scheme). Donne saved those gems for God. His lyrics are written in stanzas using a variety of line lengths and rhyme schemes. His longer poems are primarily in rhymed couplets, although there are also poems in triplets, alternating rhymes and stanzas with intricately interwoven rhyme schemes.

Ben Jonson complained ‘that Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’. Yet Donne’s lines do scan; as Samuel Taylor Coleridge realized, ‘the sense must be understood in order to ascertain the metre’.14 Like most English poets before the twentieth century, Donne writes in traditional metric patterns, most often in iambs: successive feet with one unstressed and one stressed beat (–´). Yet his iambic rhythms are loosened by an unusually high number of substitutions and elisions that unfetter and intensify the verse, capturing the rugged unpredictability of colloquial speech. ‘Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV)’, for example, derives its explosive energy from a preponderance of caesurae, or pauses (//), and spondees, or double stresses (˝):

Bátter /mȳ heárt, // thrée-pér/sōned Gód; // fōr Yóu

Ās yét/ būt knóck, // bréathe, // shíne, // ānd séek /tō ménd.

In Donne’s lyrics, as in Shakespeare’s plays, the rhythms of spoken English continually break through the formal metrical pattern. His lyrics are noted for their dramatic, colloquial opening lines: ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love’ (‘The Canonization’); ‘I wonder by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved’ (‘The Good Morrow’); ‘Who will believe me if I swear / That I have had the plague a year?’ (‘The Broken Heart’).

Unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries – most notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare – Donne does not deploy elaborate descriptions of symbolic natural landscapes, classical myths or female beauty. As his fellow poet, Thomas Carey, wrote in his elegy upon Donne’s death:

The Muses’ garden with pedantic weeds

O’erspread, was purged by thee, the lazy feeds

Of servile imitation thrown away,

And fresh invention planted.

Donne can luxuriate in a lovely natural image – ‘Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough, / From love’s awakened root do bud out now’ (‘Love’s Growth’) – but not often, and not for long.

Suspicious of beauteous language, Donne prefers shockingly unpoetic images that dazzle the mind and penetrate the skin. ‘The Flea’ turns a pesky little louse, a conventional trope of libertine poets, into something marvellous: ‘and this / Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; / … we’are met / And cloistered in these living walls of jet’. Donne’s images can be as strikingly encapsulated as ‘these living walls of jet’ or the ‘bracelet of bright hair about the bone’ of the speaker’s corpse in ‘The Relic’. Yet Donne was also a master of elaborate, extended comparisons known as metaphysical conceits, which require the reader to stop and figure out how, or how successfully, the image captures the conceptual or emotional complexities it seeks to depict. Stanley Fish argues that Donne was his own most important and discriminating reader, and Donne often reconsiders as the lines unfold.15 ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ abandons one dazzling but unsatisfying trope after another: ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one … If they be two, they are two so / As …’

Donne’s innovative diction, intricate syntax and shifting constellation of images dramatize the movement of thoughts unfolding as one line or stanza turns to the next. The first stanza of ‘The Good Morrow’ concludes with a resounding but conventional abstraction about love and beauty, punctuated though not quite punctured by an irreverent joke about the speaker’s previous sexual conquests: ‘If ever any beauty I did see, / Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee’. The next stanza starts anew – ‘And now good morrow to our waking souls’ – as if to reassure the woman to whom the poem is addressed that their exalted, consummated love is as fresh and natural as the awakening morning.

Donne reinvigorates poetic language with ‘new-made idiom’ (to borrow a phrase from ‘Valediction of the Book’) drawn from everyday life: building, medicine, food, law, trade, finance, warfare, geographical exploration, astronomy, astrology. Nothing is off limits, nothing too mundane, far-fetched or graphic. ‘Satire IV’ is rooted in the stuff of this world, ‘A license, old iron, boots, shoes, and egg- / shells’.