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

1983

353. Abrahamson, R. L. “The Vision of Redemption in Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” SMy 6: 62–69. Maintains that, for Donne, the world was “not tragic but essentially comic” because he believed that “all suffering can ultimately be redeemed by elevating the soul above temporal affairs and turning it towards God.” Finds the most vivid presentation of this kind of redemption in Devotions, the whole theme of which is to express “the movement of the soul beyond vicissitude to a resolution with God” (62). Discusses how the Ignatian tradition of formal meditation (using the memory, understanding, and will) “provides the structure for Donne’s redemptive progression” (66) in the Devotions and how the moral vision of the work, as conventional as its structure, comes from “the medieval tradition of contemptus mundi.” Maintains that what is truly original in the Devotions is “the passionate drama” or “imaginative vision” that Donne produces, in which the soul resolves its “dilemmas and problems in the light of the will of God” and “makes this resolution with an exuberance and sense of triumph all the more powerful for the contrast to the agony and despair which preceded it” (67). 354. Aizawa, Yoshihisa. “John Donne no ‘Shunen Tsuitoshi’ Ko (6)” [A Study of John Donne’s Anniversaries (6)]. Jinbungakka Ronshu [Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities, Ibaraki University] 16: 183–208. Part 6 of an eight-part series. Examines Donne’s motivation and the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Anniversaries and surveys the criticism on the two poems from Jonson to Herbert J. C. Grierson. 355. Aizawa, Yoshihisa. “John Donne to Rakuen no Imeiji” [John Donne and his ‘Image’ of ‘Paradise’], in Eibungaku Shiron [Essays in English Literature in Honor of the 77th Anniversary of the Birth of Professor Isamu Muraoka], 110–21. Tokyo: Kinseido. Analyzes how the image of Paradise is used in Twick, ValName, GoodM, ElNat, ElBed, and FirAn. Points out that Donne’s Paradise functions as a kind of “surrogatus mundi” or a refuge of the mind and that he made Paradise into the “hortus conclusus,” using a variety of traditional ideas about gardens , such as the garden as the “locus amoenus,” the Epicurean garden as the “hortus deliciarum,” and the biblical Garden of Eden. 356. Bann, Stephen. “Isaak Walton et John Donne,” in John Donne, ed. Jean-Marie Benoist, 31–38. Les Dossiers H, gen. eds. Jacqueline de Roux and François Denoël. Herissey: L’Age d’Homme. Presents a biographical sketch of Walton and discusses his published works, including his biography of Donne. Comments on Walton’s acquaintance with Donne and his theory of biography . Suggests why Walton shows little concern with Donne’s poetry in his account of Donne’s life. 1983 115 116 1983 357. Barber, Charles. Poetry in English: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press. x, 220p. Presents a critical reading of ValMourn to illustrate major characteristics of Donne’s secular lyrics (73–77) and also a briefer critical reading of Sickness to show that the religious poems of his later years “bear striking resemblances ” to Donne’s earlier love poems (179–81). Also comments briefly on Donne’s use of “colloquial and strikingly dramatic” (39) language in the opening lines of his poems. 358. Bell, Ilona. “The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonets.” SEL 23: 113–29. Rejects the accusations of critics who read the Songs and Sonets as “an assertion of Donne’s ego” more than as “a response to the lady’s feelings, more as an expression of ideas he brings to the relationship than perceptions which emerge from it,” and offers “a minority perspective” by arguing that in his love poems Donne achieves “an empathetic, imaginative, and varied response to the lady’s point of view” (113). Presents “a revisionist reading” of several poems to show “the lady’s dynamic, suasive effect upon the speaker’s own intense personal moods,” insisting that “what Donne and his speaker expressed most intensely was not egocentricity or intellectuality but empathy” (115). Argues that “the brilliance of Donne’s love poems arises (at least in part) from his unprecedented capacity to elicit and articulate and respond to the woman’s point of view” (116). Maintains that even in poems of “lusty frivolity ” (117) and cynical wittiness, such as Ind, SGo, and WomCon, Donne “never becomes a thoroughly convincing rake precisely because he cannot ever completely ignore the woman’s feelings.” Through a reading of SunRis and GoodM...