University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work 5-1995 "Contraryes Meete in One": A Psychobiography of John Donne Lisa Anderson University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Recommended Citation Anderson, Lisa, ""Contraryes Meete in One": A Psychobiography of John Donne" (1995). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. "Contraryes Meete In One": A Psychobiography of John Donne by Lisa Anderson Tennessee Scholars Senior Project & English Honors Thesis Project Director: Dr. Rob Stillman Second Readers: Dr. Al Burstein Dr . Jack Reese April 28, 1995 1 John Donne and his poetry have long been a tremendous source of interest for readers and scholars alike. Once more, with the development of psychoanalytic theory and its application to works of art and literature, John Donne's life and poetry have become, not surprisingly, a subject for analysis. One reason for psychoanalytic critics to be concerned with Donne is the complex nature of his poems, reflecting a struggle between dichotomous emotions influenced by the forces of sex and death. One example of Donne's poetry that displays this complex quality and illustrates the potential inherent in a psychoanalytic reading is Holy Sonnet XVII: Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead And her Soule early into heaven ravished, Wholy in heavenly things my mind in sett.