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JOHN DONNE AND FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO: POETS OF LOVE AND DEATH BY L. ELAINE HOOVER (University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, 61. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978. xxix + 226 pages. $16.00.) While this comparative study of Donne and Quevedo provides no radically new readings of either poet nor searches for new meanings of the Metaphysical manifestations of the Baroque, its orderly presentation of poetic tradition and innovation may serve to clarify the stages of a literary process. Precisely because Professor Hoover does not make the complexities of poetic development a metaphysical problem in itself, the categories remain distinct and the points of reference remain constant. The medieval consciousness of death is superseded by the Renaissance celebration of life, which in the Baroque period leads to a renewed and intensified obsession with death and its accomplices, time and mutability. The Petrarchan system gives this movement direction and offers Hoover a basis for comparison of Quevedo's (Petrarchan) sonnet sequence dedicated to Lisi and Donne's (anti-Petrarchan) Songs and Sonnets. Medieval man views the interplay of life and death as a pattern of equanimity, while Baroque man probes the insoluble mysteries of temporal existence, searching for truth and unity through structures of duality. In their love poetry, Quevedo and Donne seek to transcend the negative elements of the operative antitheses by replacing temporality, illusion, and death with permanence in love. The union of requited love allows Donne to conquer time and death, and Quevedo conveys his own solitary triumph by immortalizing his unrequited love for Lisi. In both cases, the love objects are converted into objects of meditation, and amatory despair is the form of expression of existential anguish. The consequence of this meditation is an ambivalent view of love—in its transcendence of death and its destruction by death—and ultimately a veneration of death as the instrument of man's disillusionment, but even this recognition comes within a framework of contradictions and paradoxes. Ironically, perhaps, the love poems of Donne and Quevedo may be seen as philosophical works on the inevitability and the continuous presence of death, forming part of the seventeenthcentury perspective on man and his conception of the universe. Professor Hoover indicates both the authors' debt to Petrarchan and courtly love conventions and their divergence from these conventions. Within a limited number of poems (somewhat atypical in Quevedo's case), she establishes a link between love and death and between poet and poet. EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN* 'EDWARD FRIEDMAN is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University. His major research area is Golden Age literature. 156VOL 34. NO 2(SPRING 1980) ...

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