TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0001
[John Donne, body, soul]
This introductory chapter begins by explaining how something so crucial to nearly all of John Donne's writing—his preoccupation with the absolute centrality of the body and soul's union—has not been fully acknowledged by centuries of readers and critics. The discussion then turns to what it was about the body and soul that mattered so deeply to Donne, and how we might account for his lifelong fascination with imagining both the moment they part and the prospect of their coming together again. (pages 1 - 24)
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Letters - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0002
[John Donne, letters, letter writing]
This chapter focuses on John Donne's letters, asking why his craving for intimacy takes the form of a longing to write and receive letters. For Donne, the letter was not simply a useful, if lesser substitute for actual personal contact, nor was it primarily a means of generating social connections that were otherwise outside his reach. Letters appear to have offered Donne a series of tantalizing possibilities, at once physical and metaphysical, which otherwise seemed to elude him. In letters, he felt he could overcome the problems of separation and absence that haunted him throughout his life, and could convey aspects of his body and soul to friends without needing to be physically present. In letters, Donne felt he could create physical and spiritual modes of intimacy that would endure beyond the immediate moment, and felt that he could “inanimate” dead matter—making the corpse of the paper come alive through the sheer act of writing. (pages 25 - 48)
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Songs and Sonnets - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0003
[John Donne, love poets, love poetry, mutual love, valedictory poems, body, soul]
Donne has long been celebrated as one of the great love poets of the English language. But what is it that distinguishes his love poetry, and why do we keep coming back to it? This chapter suggests that what distinguishes Donne as a love poet is at once the intensity of the pleasure he conveys in the moment of mutual love, and the ferocity with which he attempts to prolong that moment for as long as he can, knowing full well that its end may be near. In the Songs and Sonnets, he takes up the project of writing valedictory poems, but, in doing so, brings to the surface all of the anxieties that surround the task of bidding farewell and ensuring reunion through the medium of verse. It is in response to the fear of lovers' parting that the Songs and Sonnets are often most vital and alive, just as it is in response to the fear of death—when body and soul must part—that Donne's devotional verse becomes most animated. Indeed, Donne's attitude toward the bond between body and soul extends in crucial ways to his attitude toward the bond between two lovers. (pages 49 - 78)
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The Anniversaries - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0004
[John Donne, death, body, soul, Second Anniversarie]
This chapter analyzes The Second Anniversarie, written in 1612 for the two-year anniversary of the death of Elizabeth Drury, in which Donne stages in the most vivid terms the difficulty of convincing the soul to leave the body behind. He also comes closer than anywhere else in his writings to explaining why the soul feels so strong an attachment to the flesh, an explanation that turns on an unorthodox account of the soul's origins. (pages 79 - 105)
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Holy Sonnets - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0005
[John Donne, divine judgment, body, soul, poems]
This chapter analyzes the Holy Sonnets, which represent Donne's earliest imaginings of the consequences of divine judgment. Because Donne's primary concern in the Holy Sonnets lies in gauging his chances for salvation, he attends more to the state of the soul than to the state of the body. In this respect, these poems are less immediately interested in the relationship between the two parts of the self than many of Donne's other works. Yet, Donne's concerns about his spiritual condition are always entangled with his concerns about his physical condition. The Holy Sonnets are suffused with the language of bodily decay, and their urgent pleas for repair are with equal frequency directed at the mortal flesh as at the immortal soul. (pages 106 - 129)
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Devotions - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0006
[John Donne, prose narrative, illness, God, health, soul, body]
This chapter analyzes the Devotions, a prose narrative written after Donne's recovery from what was probably typhoid fever during the autumn of 1623. Throughout this work, Donne struggles both to accept his sickness as a message from God, and to effect a return to health in soul as well as in body. With the exception of his physicians, he seems to be entirely alone throughout the illness he recounts, and his only sustained dialogue is with God. The act of writing the Devotions was an attempt to possess or control what is otherwise outside of Donne's control. It was an effort to contain within his own script the otherwise terrifying uncertainty that surrounds the cycle of health, illness, and possible recovery. (pages 130 - 153)
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Deaths Duell - Ramie Targoff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789781.003.0007
[John Donne, sermons, minister, Church of England, resurrection, live performance]
When Donne became a minister in the Church of England, he pursued his lifelong preoccupation with the resurrection of the flesh in a manner unprecedented in his earlier works. The final proof of how profound an obsession the resurrection was for Donne comes in the last sermon he ever wrote. In this sermon, Donne not only rehearses his fears about bodily corruption and his hopes for divine reconstitution, as he had on earlier occasions, but also attempts to stage his own death in the pulpit, to perform his valediction to the world. On the first Friday of Lent in February 1631, Donne preached before King Charles I and hundreds of listeners at Whitehall Palace a sermon that was published one year later with the posthumous title Deaths Duell, or A Consolation to the Soule against the Dying Life and Living Death of the Body. More than any of Donne's other sermons, Deaths Duell reminds us again and again that the text we have received is merely a script of what was originally a live performance. (pages 154 - 184)
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Notes
Index
