Achsah Guibbory, Returning to John Donne

Abstract

‘Donne, with his rage for order, epitomizes our nature as meaning-seeking beings’ (4–5). Where Milton tracks man’s place in history, Donne ‘obsessively analyzes the experience of living’ (5). Donne casts himself as the observer of a divinely created world that is figurative and in which God speaks through metaphor; it is by paying close attention to Donne’s own acts of interpretation, then, that the reader can travel alongside him as he ‘figures things out’. These traits encapsulate Achsah Guibbory’s longstanding fascination with John Donne, and almost every aspect of his secular and devotional poems and prose works. Like a Greatest Hits album, Returning to John Donne brings together thirteen articles and book chapters, ten of which were published separately elsewhere between 1983 and 2011, and which have been rekeyed and their referencing updated. Guibbory imposes order by means of a three-part division. The latter two on ‘Love’ and ‘Religion’ are solid sections of six and four chapters respectively, although the first, ‘Time and History’, is somewhat less thematically coherent with two chapters, one of the theme of decay and the other on the ways in which Donne and Jonson addressed, and conceived of, their present and future readers. The book is furnished with a new introduction and section heads that reflect on Guibbory’s personal experience and scholarly engagements. At times I wish these headnotes would engage more thoroughly with the movements of Donne scholarship over the decades, but this field is now so vast that this would easily inflate these pithy reflections to unmanageable proportions, and what is refreshingly frank here is how Guibbory’s own personal and scholarly identity is brought into conversation with Donne’s works. Rounding out the book are three new chapters: a concise reading of Donne’s Devotions to Emergent Occasions, which oddly comes before the three parts and so belongs to none; a short coda to the section on love dealing with ‘Depersonalization, Disappointment, and Disillusion’; and as the most substantial new offering, a chapter on cross-confessional toleration that ranges widely across Donne’s works.