What Was Donne Doing?

Abstract

It is not yet clear what my generation, or the students we train, will make of the secular Donne. There are signs, in fact, that our contribution may be surprisingly meager. For three decades the best single book on Donne remained Leishman's The Monarch of Wit (1951), and if it has now been superseded in some part by John Carey's John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1980), the improvement is nothing to get excited about. For much of the book Carey fleshes out Leishman's self-dramatizing Donne with new lines of argument baldly calculated to appeal (without the bother of qualification), first, to our age-old sense of integrity (hence Donne's apostate betrayal of Catholicism, there being no evidence that he was seriously committed to it in the first place) and, second, to our newly acquired sense of female oppression. Carey works up an easy, melodramatic, self-congratulatory sympathy for all those uninstructed women of yore vulnerable to the bejeweled codpiece of Donne's swaggering rhetoric. Their John, in Carey's view, was a latent Jack the Ripper who brought serious frustrations to the bedroom and, as a substitute for more drastic forms of violent release, verbally bullied his female victims into submission. The stripped Madame of Elegy XIX, commanded to remove one by one her protective garments, stands as the epitome of them all. In a misfired rhetorical decision, Carey terms her and every woman implicated in the love poems a girl. But at least we learn something from this-how a critic shows, when attacking the male ego, that he is man enough to have one. In any case, this second line of argument is C. S. Lewis warmed over for an age of feminism.' Still, although one reviewer confessed that Carey on Donne left him imagining the book on love poetry an academic Iago might produce, this work has struck some readers as a welcome reorientation of Donne criticism.2 Carey could seem fresh only because we are not, by and large, getting anywhere with Donne. The fact is that this poet does not yield very readily to our current passion for being comprehensive, adducing formulae that hold good throughout an entirety, able, for instance, to skewer with a single predicate Parmenides, Hegel, Cardinal Newman, and Harold Bloom. Comprehension is precisely what Donne studies have always been forced