John Donne and the Debate About Women

Because of T.S. Eliot’s emphasis on technical excellence, on the poetry rather than the poet, New Critics observed rather scrupulously the distinction between poet and speaker. F.R. Leavis points out “the subtleties of Donne’s use of the speaking voice,” and Cleanth Brooks and Murray Krieger focus exclusively on the poetic logic of the “speaker” in their readings of “The Canonization.” Nevertheless in the famous rehabilitation of Donne, analysis could easily veer back to biography through claims about Donne’s individualism. Leavis stressed “the extraordinary force of originality that made Donne so potent an influence on the seventeenth century,” and J.B. Leishman identified the verse as “eccentrically and unclassically individual.” Leishman is an interesting case, because although he clearly accepted the tenets of New Criticism by refusing to approach poetry as personal expression, he also uncovered several of the historical contexts for Donne’s verse, work that is still influencing scholars today. Yet with Leishman, we find the dilemma of Donne for modern critics: dividing poet from speaker in the libertine poems serves their interests well, but the poems of mutual love are “sincere,” “serious,” and “written out of his experience of marriage.”¹

New Historicists are just as prone to make this argument as New Critics. Arthur Marotti illuminates the various coterie networks within which Donne writes, and admits that the mutual love poems imply “a (male) coterie readership aware of both the literary and social circumstances of the verse.” Nevertheless Marotti must have a married Donne writing from “an actual love relationship…. No matter how self-consciously witty or literarily complex, these poems locate their rhetorical and dramatic action in the context of strong amorous feeling.”²

As Leishman admits, there is no trustworthy evidence to support this view. Dating for the Songs and Sonnets is almost non-existent and never more than approximate. Leishman and John Carey depend on Izaac Walton’s account that “Valediction: forbidding Mourning” was “given by Mr. Donne to his wife at the time that he then parted from her” in 1611. But David Novarr has demonstrated that Walton is particularly unreliable on the events of Donne’s life in 1611. Walton also added the detail about the “Valediction” poem only to the third edition of the Life (1675) in order to affirm Donne’s piety before ordination, and only internal evidence from the poem is used to support his claim. Helen Gardner rejects Walton’s account out of hand. Marotti, Leishman, and Walton all accept Donne’s problematic reconstruction of his life as a conversion from secular to sacred by understanding the poems of mutual love as a step that took the poet closer to God, as Donne writes in Holy Sonnet 17: “Here the admyring her my mind did whett / To seeke thee God; so streames do shew their head.” Just as ordination saved Donne from his rakish past for seventeenth-century readers, so Donne is freed from the “blackguardism” of the libertine poems for modern critics through affection for his wife.³

This modern prejudice for self-expression determines that New Critics and New Historicists use the “sincere” mutual love poems to orient themselves to the rest of Donne’s poetry, an approach that obscures the role of rhetorical performance in early modern poetry and education. The range of views about women and love in Donne’s poems implies that, in each, he is working out a position rather than presenting his own opinion. We will find that Donne’s verses on mutual love verge on orthodox church doctrine, one position within the debate about women, rather than any revelation of personal feeling.

Leishman and Gardner argued long ago that, in attitude and tone, Donne’s lyrics range from misogyny to mutual love to reverence. But they did not recognize that these are positions within the contemporary controversy about women. Donne’s version of the debate stems not so much from the pamphlet wars, recently illuminated by several scholars, but rather from the rhetorical education in the schools, which trained students to argue on both sides of a question. Joel Altman has described...