A Psychobiography of John Donne
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The Canonization of John Donne
SYDNEY STUDIES The Canonization ofJohn Donne DAVID KEI..LY I In 'The Canonization' John Donne, in the person of the speaker, speculates upon the prospect of his being 'canonized'. He is using the term in the religious sense, of course, but mischievously - by implying that he and his lover will be elevated to the level of saints because they love as they do he is being playful, witty, and just a shade blasphemous. From the beginning the tone is provocative: For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five grey hairs, or ruined fortune, flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honour, or his Grace, Or the King's real, or his stamped face Contemplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love.1 A poem which takes a theological term for its title - 'The Canonization' - and then begins with a blasphemy - 'For God's sake' - is clearly playing a number of ironic games with its readers. Dramatically, the speaker appears exasperated at being continually reprimanded for his amorous life and so here he responds, not by apologizing for it but rather by mischievously pleading for the social world at large to permit love to exist in some small comer of its realm, devalued and frowned upon though it be. For this is a world that values everything above love - it is a world of affairs in every sense but the romantic. Nevertheless, the speaker is able to imply that this system of value is questionable, for this world of affairs is clearly one of sycophancy, cupidity, and hypocrisy: 'With wealth your state, your mind with arts All quotations are from The Complete English Poems, ed. -
Death, Be Not Proud POEM TEXT THEMES
Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com Death, be not proud POEM TEXT THEMES 1 Death, be not proud, though some have called thee THE POWERLESSNESS OF DEATH 2 Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; In this sonnet, often referred to by its first line or as 3 For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow “Holy Sonnet 10,” the speaker directly addresses 4 Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. death, seeking to divest it of its powers and emphasize that 5 From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, man, though fated to die, is more powerful than death itself. The poem paints a picture of death as prideful—vain, even—and 6 Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, works to deflate death’s importance by arguing firstly that 7 And soonest our best men with thee do go, death is nothing more than a rest, and secondly that following 8 Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. this rest comes the afterlife, which contradicts death’s aim of 9 Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate bringing about a final end. With death’s powerlessness proven men, by the end of the poem, it is death itself, not man, who is going 10 And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, to die. 11 And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well The speaker clearly argues against death being treated as 12 And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? something strong and important. -
John Donne 1 John Donne
John Donne 1 John Donne John Donne John Donne Born between 24 January and 19 June [1] 1572 London, England Died 31 March 1631 (aged 59) London, England Occupation Poet, priest, lawyer Nationality English Alma mater Oxford University Genres Satire, Love poetry, elegy, sermons Subjects Love, sexuality, religion, death Literary movement Metaphysical Poetry John Donne (/ˈdʌn/ DUN) (between 24 January and 19 June 1572[1] – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of British society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne’s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and theorising about. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.[2] Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. -
Proquest Dissertations
Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal, Op. 70 for guitar: A novel approach to program music and variation structure Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Alcaraz, Roberto Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 13:06:08 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279989 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be f^ any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitlsd. Brolcen or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author dkl not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectk)ning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6' x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additkxial charge. -
The Body As His Book: the Unification of Spirit and Flesh in John Donne's Holy Sonnets
Hober 1 Archived thesis/research paper/faculty publication from the University of North Carolina Asheville’s NC Docks Institutional Repository: http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/unca/ The Body as His Book: The Unification of Spirit and Flesh in John Donne's Holy Sonnets Senior Paper Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with A Major in English at The University of North Carolina at Asheville Fall 2018 By: Kelli Danielle Hober ___________________________ Thesis Director Dr. Mildred K. Barya ___________________________ Thesis Advisor Dr. Evan Gurney Hober 2 “T’our bodies turn we, then, that so Weak men on love revealed may look; Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book” (69-72). For John Donne, the spirit and the flesh are elements which are intrinsically linked. Here in his poem, “The Ecstasy,” for example, Donne presents an image of the mingling of body and soul between two lovers. Donne has spent seventeen stanzas of the poem demonstrating that love grows through the connecting of the souls, elaborating in painstaking detail the Neoplatonist1 ideal of transcending the body through love. Here at the end, however, he finally shows that though love “in souls do grow” (71), it is ultimately written on the body, which is the book. Despite his interest in Neoplatonism, Donne asserts that spiritual ecstasy is incomplete without a physical basis. The couple becomes one entity as their souls combine, but this unification is impossible to obtain without the connection of their bodies. For Donne, love starts and ends with the body; it is what unites them. -
Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002
OBITUARY Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002 orman O. Brown was born in New Mexico in 1913 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the University of Wisconsin. His tutor at Oxford was NIsaiah Berlin. A product of the 1930s, Brown was active in left-wing politics – for example, in the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign – and his work belongs within the history of Marxist, as well as psychoanalytic, thought. During World War II, he worked in the Office of Strategic Services, where his supervisor was Carl Schorske and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann. Marcuse urged Brown to read Freud, leading, in 1959, to Brownʼs most memorable work, Life Against Death. Brown taught Classics at Wesleyan University and was a member of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Although Life Against Death made him an icon of the New Left, he successfully eschewed publicity, insisting to the end on his primary identity as teacher. There is still no better introduction to Life Against Death than the one that Brown wrote in 1959. The book was inspired, he explained, by a felt ʻneed to reappraise the nature and destiny of manʼ. The ʻdeep study of Freudʼ was the natural means for this undertaking. His motives, Brown continued, were political in the most profound sense of the term: ʻInheriting from the Protestant tradition a conscience which insisted that intellectual work should be directed toward the relief of manʼs estate, I, like many of my generation, lived through the superannuation of the political categories which informed liberal thought and action in the 1930s.ʼ ʻThose of us who are tempera- mentally incapable of embracing the politics of sin, cynicism and despairʼ, he added, were ʻcompelled to re-examine the classic assumptions about the nature of politics and about the political character of human nature.ʼ How did it come about, at the dawn of the 1960s, that Freud appeared as the suc- cessor to a ʻsuperannuatedʼ, but not yet surpassed, Marxist project? Life Against Death addressed this question. -
Freud and Epicurean Philosophy: Revisiting Drive Theory
Contemporary Psychoanalysis,2014,Vol.50,No.3:395–417. C William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology and ⃝ the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society ISSN: 0010-7530 print / 2330-9091 online DOI: 10.1080/00107530.2014.922859 JONATHAN YAHALOM, M.A. FREUD AND EPICUREAN PHILOSOPHY: REVISITING DRIVE THEORY Abstract. This article reviews Epicurean philosophy to expose Freud’s drive theory as overly quantitative and lacking a qualitative dimension. Epicurean philosophy is congruent with fundamental premises in psychoanalysis, and contributes a qualitative and quantitative theory of pleasure. Moreover, Epicurean philosophy is compatible with fundamental tenets within relational psychoanalysis, indicat- ing that drive theory is relevant—and possibly constitutive—to the relational perspective. After reviewing Epicurean philosophy, the article returns to Freud’s conceptualization of drive. Arguments are made against Freud’s hypothesis of a death drive, insofar as Freud believed that organisms are motivated by the pur- suit of pleasure in an isolated individualistic manner. The article maintains that a critical exploration of Epicureanism challenges our tendency to equate classical drive theory with material reductionism. This carries significant implications for contemporary psychoanalysis and its interpretation of the drives. Keywords: Epicurean philosophy, drive theory, pleasure principle, relational psychoanalysis Introduction Relational theorists have critiqued Freud’s drive theory, arguing that in- terpersonal factors—not intrapsychic drives—define mental life. For ex- ample, Greenberg (1991) calls for the “radical rejection of drive [theory]” because “all motivation unfolds from our personal experience of ex- change with others” (p. vii). Motivation theory certainly benefits from this Address correspondence to Jonathan Yahalom, M.A., Duquesne University, Psychol- ogy Department, 600 Forbes Avenue, 544 College Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15282. -
Norman O. Brown Page 1
Patterson – Norman O. Brown page 1 Norman O. Brown: A 20th Century Intellectual Odyssey “Look upon me! I'll show you the Life of the Mind!" Charlie Meadows (aka Karl "Madman" Mundt) as he sets the hotel on fire in Barton Fink It’s time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo- American tradition. McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown were steeped in literature, classical to modern. They understood the creative imagination, and they extended their insights into speculation about history and society. Their influence was positive and fruitful: They did not impose their system on acolytes but liberated a whole generation of students to think freely and to discover their own voices…. My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas—a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body , and at the same time a visionary celebration of artistic metaspace—that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring or own cyberspace. Camille Paglia, February 17, 2000. Patterson – Norman O. Brown page 2 Introduction The evolution of Norman O. Brown's thought seems at first glance to be completely unique. I can well imagine that librarians were puzzled about how to classify some of his books when they first appeared, and it is still anyone's guess as to where to look in a bookstore for a copy of Love's Body. -
Time, Death, and Mutability : a Study of Themes in Some Poetry of The
TIME, DEATH, and MUTABILITY: A Study of Themes in Some Poetry of the Renaissance - Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne Jean Miriam Gerber B.A., Pennsylvania State University, 1961 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFUHE3T OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English Jean Miriam Gerber, 1968 Simon Fraser University J~Y,1968 EXA XINIMG COK4ITTEX APPROVAL (name) Senior Supervisor \ ( name) Examining Cormittoe " - ( name ) Examining Conunittee PARTTAL COPYRIGIIT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis or dissertation (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Sttldies. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis/~issertation: Author: (signature ) (name ) (date) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank Mr. Clark Cook for his many suggestions and close attention. Special thanks are also due to Mr. James Sandison who read this study in manuscript. Above all I wish to thank Dr. F. B. Candelaria, who supervised the thesis. ABSTRACT This study was undertaken in order to exanine some examples of Renaissance poe+zy in the light of the themes of love, death, time, and mutability. -
John Donne on Repentance
John Donne on Repentance: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay? 1572 – 1631 John Donne’s Life 1571/72 Born of a mother from an eminent Roman Catholic family 1576 His father dies 1584 Begins study at Hart Hall, Oxford 1592 Studies law at Lincoln’s Inn (as a Roman Catholic, could not receive an Oxford degree); begins writing “secular poetry”; becomes a “man about town,” an admirer of “fair women.” 1593 Donne’s brother Henry dies in Newgate Prison after sheltering a Roman Catholic priest; Donne tends toward scepticism 1596/97 “Military Adventure”: serves Earl of Essex in expedition against Cadiz, in the Azores 1598? Conforms to Church of England; becomes secretary to Sir Thomas Edgerton 1601-1615 Secretly marries Ann More, niece of Edgerton’s wife, a minor (age 17); Donne is briefly imprisoned and they live in poverty. Ann gives birth to 12 children, five of whom die; Donne writes religious poetry and controversial religious writings: Pseudo-Martyr; Essays in Divinity John Donne’s Life 1615 Ordained to C of E at King James’s encouragement 1616 Divinity Reader, Lincoln’s Inn 1617 Ann More dies in childbirth (age 33); Donne deeply affected by her death 1621 Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral 1623 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (during an illness) 1631 Preaches “Death’s Duel,” his final sermon; Dies March 31 Donne’s Writings • Religious Poetry • Prose – La Corona – Essays in Divinity – Holy Sonnets – Sermons (Ten Volumes) “Batter my heart, three – Devotions Upon Emergent person’d God . .” Occasions – A Litanie – The Crosse – Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse – A Hymne to God the Father • “Wilt thou forgive that sinne . -
Strategies of Persuasion and Argument in John Donne's Poetry Nazreen Laffir Pace University
Pace University DigitalCommons@Pace Honors College Theses Pforzheimer Honors College 8-25-2005 "Mark in this": Strategies of Persuasion and Argument in John Donne's Poetry Nazreen Laffir Pace University Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Laffir, Nazreen, ""Mark in this": Strategies of Persuasion and Argument in John Donne's Poetry" (2005). Honors College Theses. Paper 17. http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses/17 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Pforzheimer Honors College at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College Theses by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Laffir 1 Nazreen Laffir Honors Thesis Dr. Pender 17 May 2005 “Mark in this”: Strategies of Persuasion and Argument in John Donne’s Poetry Whether he is writing an erotic lyric, a mutual love poem or a holy sonnet, John Donne’s poems employ a similar argumentative structure. Although "The Flea," an erotic lyric, "The Canonization," a mutual love poem, and "Batter My Heart," a holy sonnet portray different types of love, Donne’s argumentative structure in these poems is similar to each other. In "The Flea," "The Canonization," and "Batter My Heart," Donne's speakers present a claim or command which they defend throughout the rest of the poem. The speakers use persuasive strategies to defend and validate their assertions. As the poems conclude, the speakers remain confident that their propositions will triumph. In “The Flea,” the speaker tries to seduce a lady by arguing that the lady’s blood and his blood are combined in a flea. -
The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History
History and Theory 51 (February 2012), 63-83 © Wesleyan University 2012 ISSN: 0018-2656 THE THIRD ANNUAL HISTORY AND THEORY LECTURE1 THE INCOMMENSURABILITY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY JOAN W. SCOTT2 ABSTRACT This article argues that, although psychoanalysis and history have different conceptions of time and causality, there can be a productive relationship between them. Psychoanalysis can force historians to question their certainty about facts, narrative, and cause; it intro- duces disturbing notions about unconscious motivation and the effects of fantasy on the making of history. This was not the case with the movement for psychohistory that began in the 1970s. Then the influence of American ego-psychology on history-writing promoted the idea of compatibility between the two disciplines in ways that undercut the critical possibilities of their interaction. The work of the French historian Michel de Certeau pro- vides theoretical insight into the uses of incommensurability, while that of Lyndal Roper demonstrates both its limits and its value for enriching historical understanding. Keywords: psychohistory, psychoanalysis, history-writing, ego-psychology, Freudian theory, transference. “Clio to thee, O Muse, has been vouchsafed the power to know the hearts of the gods and the ways by which things come to be.” So wrote the Roman Valerius Flaccus in the first century CE.3 In the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, we might say that this invocation takes the Muse of History to be an (imagined) authoritative subject, she who is supposed to know. Historians become, in this reading, Clio’s analysands, pinning our hopes for enlightenment on the knowl- edge we presume she can impart to us.