Going in the Wrong Direction: Lyric Criticism and Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward”

As knowledges are now delivered, there is a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver: for he that delivereth knowledge, desires to deliver it in such form as may best be believed, and not as may best be examined; and he that receiveth knowledge, desireth rather present satisfaction, than expectant inquiry. – Francis Bacon¹

In this brief essay, I am going to trace what I see as a particular “contract of error” that afflicted Donne criticism for at least twenty-five years, starting in the early 1960s, and seems to be continuing to do so. It may seem odd to celebrate the work of Donald Friedman by placing an essay of his in such a history, but the fact that his essay has such a decisive role in this history is a tribute to his persuasiveness and authority as a critic. On my view, only a “strong” critic, in Harold Bloom’s sense, could have lodged an error so firmly into critical history. Moreover, I think this little effort at analyzing the historical record would (and I hope, will) be seen by Don himself as a form of tribute to his intense seriousness as a scholar and an intellectual. One of the features that I have treasured in Don Friedman over the years – as in Louis Martz and Wayne Booth – is that he is genuinely more interested in getting at the truth about matters that he cares about than in defending what he has said or written about such matters. Like those other figures mentioned, with whom I have been privileged to be in long-term personal and intellectual dialogue, Donald Friedman is capable of seeing, as Blake said, opposition as true friendship

Before proceeding to my particular case, I want to hazard a few generalizations about what seem to me to be two besetting sins of Donne (and much poetry) criticism in the period that I am surveying. The first of these “sins” is perhaps abating – perhaps. The second is thriving, sometimes in a new form. Both of these “sins” are methodological, though the first is formalist and the second is not. They are completely separable, but they can (as we shall see in our case study) easily occur together. The first of these besetting sins is overmuch talk about personae. There is some evidence, as I said, that this is abating, and that sometimes we can now take a poet to (sometimes) have spoken for him or herself in poems, but I fear that such a view still runs the risk of being thought “unsophisticated” (almost as horrible a thing as a view being thought “anachronistic”). In any case, through regular resort to this notion, critics have been able to slough off as a deliberate fiction or device anything in poems that seems disturbing, inconsequent, immoral, unattractive, or incompetent. Much bad writing and logical or emotional contradiction has thus been praised, and has been moved from the potentially troubling realm of psychology or history into the protected one of fiction.

The second besetting sin can be referred to as the importation of scholarly baggage. This can be either of an “old” or “new” historicist sort – i.e., from intellectual or social history – but in either case, a critic or scholar ascribes to the poem everything he or she can find on any topic mentioned or putatively alluded to in a poem, so that this “background” or “epistemic” or “socially circulating” material is somehow seen as determining what the poem means. These procedures seem to me to have vitiated a great deal of Donne (and other) criticism. Now, I do not mean to deny that Donne (and other poets) sometime used personae, and I certainly do not want to discourage scholarship, but I think that we should restrict talk about personae to cases where the speaker has clearly specifiable differences from the historical author, and I think that the application of scholarly knowledge to poems needs to be controlled by a very strict sense of contextual relevance and by a non-totalizing sense of what...