John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979-1995

1985

547. Ackerley, Chris. “The ‘White Alps’ of Under the Volcano.” MLNew 17–18 (1985–86): 138–39. Cites a possible reference to ElFatal (ll. 47–56) in Chapter 3 of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and in Chapter 4 of an earlier draft of the novel. 548. Albright, Daniel. Lyricality in English Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. x, 276p. Attempts “to provide a definition of the lyric” and to show “why such a definition is at best provisional.” Believes that “lyric poetry is fundamentally an attempt to approximate the condition of music within the slightly alien and prosaic domain of words, whether through phonemic intricacies or through the frustrating of semantic reference or through the presentation of transcendental ideas or of absolute feelings.” Maintains that “the lyric is not truly a genre,” arguing rather that “it is a mode, discoverable in odes and dramas and novels and possibly telephone directories, through which the reader becomes aware of the illusion of music beyond the sense of the language” (ix). Cites Donne to illustrate various aspects of the argument. For instance, discussing lyrical ethics, calls Metem “[t]he great poem in English to demonstrate the unethicality of the lyric” (88); and, commenting on satirical poetry, cites Sat4 to illustrate the analogical mode of satire and Sat2 to show how Donne anticipates Swift in realizing that “[t]o speak the language of satire tends to reduce the satirist’s own speech to excrement” (137). Briefly comments on Carew’s “Elegie upon the Death of the Dean of Pauls, Dr. John Donne,” calling it “eloquent” in its treatment of “Donne’s power to transmute and invigorate the English language” (194). Suggests that “metaphysical poetry is difficult precisely because we are not used to reading such extremely lyrical poetry,” and quotes Sat5 to show “the limit of poetic license.” Says that “[m]ost poems by Donne should be read in a spirit of intellectual delirium,” noting that “Donne continually uses the language of logic, of analogy, but it is only a game in which the mind delights in the reeling sensation it feels as it gropes for logical relations amid a pervasive alogicality ” (250). 549. Alves, Leonard. “Well Donne, Ill Donne: The Relevance of John Donne 1571/2– 1631.” ELLS 22: 21–41. Presents an introduction to Donne’s life and a general survey of his poetry and prose. Suggests that “the twentieth century has come round to an appreciation of Donne via the poetics of Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Wallace Stevens inter alia with the result that his reputation has been salvaged and confirmed for posterity” (23). Believes that Donne’s wit is “identified with his idiosyncratic mind as revealed in his poems and thus is original and inimitable ” (25). Calls Donne “a deeply religious man” who was “a victim” 1985 179 180 1985 (30) of the religious tensions of his day and who, “for some mysterious reason,” finally “decided to turn his back on Catholicism” (34). Calls Donne “a breaker of images, a nonconformist , a rebel but above all an individualist” (41). 550. Anselment, Raymond A. “The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality.” SP 82: 212–33. In a biographical account of Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, that comments on a prose character sketch of her by Tobie Matthew and poems on her by several Caroline poets, notes that her husband, James Hay, was one of Donne’s patrons and that John Donne the younger wrote an epistle to her, “To the Right Honorable Lucy, Countesse of Carleile [sic],” that was published in A Collection of Letters, Made by Sr Tobie Matthew Kn (1660). 551. Bachinger, Katrina. “Dickinson’s ‘I Heard a Fly Buzz.’” Expl 43, no. 3: 12–15. Suggests that three of Donne’s sermons on resurrection, especially his sermon at the funeral of Sir William Cokayne, preached at St. Paul’s on 12 December 1626, “provided the general impulse for the creation of [Emily] Dickinson’s dead but quick narrator” in “I heard a fly buzz,” and that “the final nudge” likely came from Devotions , which appears immediately after the Cokayne sermon in Henry Alford’s The Works of John Donne, D.D. (1839), the edition of Donne available to Dickinson. Shows how the poem is a “typically Dickinsonian reply” (13) to Donne’s views. 552. Bachrach, A. G. H. “Shakespeare, the Sea, and the Weather,” in Elizabethan and Modern Studies Presented to Professor Willem Schrickx on the Occasion...