Interinanimation and Lifelessness in John Donne’s Book Studies

Throughout John Donne’s poetry, books shuttle between animate and inanimate states, enacting “interinanimation,” a word Donne himself invented. His book conceits thus reveal an interaction between life and nonlife that takes place in books. This essay examines moments when the literal and the figural book seem to coincide in Donne’s Anniversaries, “Valediction of the Booke,” and the Latin verse letter “De Libro” in order to argue that, even while they were caught up in anthropocentric mythologies of rebirth, Renaissance books established affinities between living beings and a world of things that could never experience birth, life, or death.