AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy.(Critical Essay)
Donne is in a sense a psychologist.
-T. S. Eliot
Throughout his life, John Donne's prose and poetry are filled with references to, as well as accounts of, his self-understanding as a melancholic. [1] If we take his self-professed depressive tendencies as seriously as his devotional meditations, we find that the two are interlinked: Donne often describes ecstatic religious experience with the same metaphors of earthly instability and material metamorphoses he uses to catalogue his melancholic, self-destructive inclinations. Like Soren Kierkegaard, who will praise Christian belief in part because it entails great suffering, Donne is inclined to equate unhappiness with spiritual redemption.
Modern thinkers interested in depression have often commented on the circular nature of religious despair. According to Julia Kristeva, "the implicitness of love and consequently of reconciliation and forgiveness completely transforms the scope of Christian initiation by giving it an aura of glory and unwavering hope for those who believe. Christian faith appears then as an antidote to hiatus and depression, along with hiatus and depression and starting from them." [2] Donne uncovers a similar pattern in Holy Sonnet III("O might those sighes and teares returne againe"):
To (poore) me is allow'd
No ease; for, long, yet vehement griefe hath beene
Th'effect and cause, the punishment and sinne. [3]
- 'Let them sleepe': Donne's personal allusion in 'Holy Sonnet IV.' (John Donne)
- Magazine article from: Papers on Language & Literature Hester, M. Thomas June 22, 1993 700+ words
...have remarked on the biblical authority for the curious, "vivid" composition of place which opens John Donne's fourth Holy Sonnet (fourth in the 1633 first printed edition and in the early Westmoreland manuscript).(1) The poetic mediator's figuration...
- ALLUSIVE SONNET (III).(Poem)
- Magazine article from: Chicago Review GUTOROW, JACEK June 22, 2000 700+ words
for J. P. The man standing before an enlarger. The man opening an account. This bouquet of flowers, that bicycle, these lines on his face. The man, his forehead pressed against the glass, absorbed in the chalky, violet sky. The horizon: distant, uneasy. At last a woman, canon of afternoons piling
- John Donne in the Nineteenth Century.(Book review)
- Magazine article from: Victorian Studies Brisman, Leslie September 22, 2008 700+ words
...since the poet's own lifetime. Yet he had nothing to say about the intriguing reference to "my father's soul" in the Holy Sonnet, "If faithful souls be alike glorified." ... Although Jessopp duly quoted the letter to Sir Robert Carr in which Donne...
- Hybrid etymology.(Book Review)
- Magazine article from: New Criterion Beck, Stefan April 1, 2005 700+ words
...as a child and was pleased to revisit with Paglia's commentary. Her title, Break, Blow, Burn, comes from Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, but of her three selections from Donne, the best--with the most intriguing (not to mention creepy) exegesis...
- Facts and ideas from anywhere.(atomic bomb - the thing, that changed the...
- Magazine article from: Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings Roberts, William Clifford October 1, 2005 700+ words
...happen, and $2 billion in 1940-1945 was real money! The code name given for the test was Trinity, after a John Donne Holy Sonnet. The name was chosen by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, who smoked about 100 cigarettes...
- Dr. Atomic.(San Francisco)
- Magazine article from: Opera Canada Bender, John January 1, 2006 700+ words
...at the big moments, arioso lines soaring with poetic language. Oppenheimer closes Act I with an aria set on Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV": "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." Here and everywhere, Finley brought intensity, lucid diction, lovely...
- Doctor Atomic by John Adams.
- Magazine article from: American Record Guide Tucker, Marilyn January 1, 2006 700+ words
...Vita, poetry of Baudelaire, mid-20th century poetry of American Muriel Rukeyser, and, most notably, John Donne, whose Holy Sonnet XIV, 'Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God', inspired Oppenheimer to call the mesa test site "Trinity". The minimalism...
- John Adams' `Doctor Atomic' opens at Met Opera.
- News wire article from: The America's Intelligence Wire October 14, 2008 700+ words
...aria is Oppenheimer's at the end of the first act: "Batter my heart, three person'd God," with a text from Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV interrupted by urgent, frantic music portending doom. Oppenheimer named the test site Trinity because of that sonnet...
- "miserrimum dictu": Donne's epitaph for his wife. (poet John Donne)
- Magazine article from: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Hester, M. Thomas October 1, 1995 700+ words
...Donne's poems than the "presence" of Anne in poems such as "The Canonization,"(7) yet it seems certain that the Holy Sonnet beginning "Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt" and probably the poem modern editors have entitled "A Nocturnall...
- It resonates: The year's best classical.
- News wire article from: San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, CA) December 28, 2005 700+ words
...toward the bomb, which is suspended above the stage and bathed in white light, and sings Adams' setting of John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, "Batter my heart, three person'd God." ". . . knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and...
Source: HighBeam Research, John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy.(Critical Essay)