Donne, the Man, the Legend

Dennis Flynn Donne, the Man, the Legend We're told repeatedly that literary biography may have no real use at all. It has been wonderfully said that "Poets don't have biographies. Their work is their biography."1 And the point is made that there would be no interest at all in the details of writers' lives except for the fact that they produce literary works. The case of Shakespeare's writings casts an interesting light on this matter, since (it is also said) "there is an embarrassing disproportion between the meager verifiable biographical events and the tremendous literary events associated with Shakespeare's name."2 Most of us involved to any degree in the Shakespeare industry seem able to compartmentalize this embarrassment, if indeed we feel it at all. In any case, it doesn't at all prevent us from enjoying productions or editions of the plays and poems, nor does it at all inhibit critical work on them. Far from it, on the contrary, it could be argued that the very sparseness of biographical detail about Shakespeare enables a kind of "Negative Capability" leading to more and better critical work than would be the case if we were tied to a more comprehensive and complete range of facts, such as (unfortunately, if you look at it from this point of view) does already exist in Donne's case. The same sort of disproportion (though not so enormous and therefore less embarrassing) may be felt between, on the one hand, the writings of Donne (which are after all why we study him) and, on the other hand, the details of his whereabouts, or his company, or his religious sensibility at particular junctures. Another wonderful saying about Shakespeare is that he "led a life of allegory," whatever that means, and that "his works are the comments on it."3 This adage may apply to Donne in some mysterious way, or to writers in general. The argument can certainly be made that in Shakespeare's case, in Donne's case, and in the cases of many other writers, we can never 42Dennis Flynn know anything near enough about the life to resolve any of the central critical questions about the writings. And, again, we already know a great deal more about Donne's life than we do about Shakespeare 's. So why should we seek contentiously after more facts of Donne's biography, and why should anyone try to change the way Donne's biography is generally viewed? Can't we just compartmentalize the urge? For some time now, I have been trying to "chip away" at the dominant conception of Donne's biography. I can hardly remember it, but there was a time when I did not have this objective. Many of us were brought up to regard biography as beside the point in the study of poetry. Not only did we reject the practice of using poems to construct a biography, we often omitted to use biographical evidence in explicating poems, even though (as we have recently been assured) this is a worthy scholarly undertaking.4 1 may have gravitated away from such abstemiousness even as an undergraduate at Columbia forty years ago, drawn as I was to the perhaps questionable notion that a poem is shaped by the imagination of its author. For me this notion always tended to suggest that the more I knew about the author, the more I could understand the poem. Without trying to figure out how this could be, without criticizing the sentimentality of the notion, I continued as an undergraduate to read the poems as I had been taught to read them, New-Critically. My predilection for biographical inquiry took on a life of its own only when, as a graduate student, I studied under Marjorie H. Nicolson, Edward S. Le Comte, and (especially) Edward W. Tayler. It was Tayler who taught me to write about Donne. When I came to him with my proposal for a master's essay, he asked me whether I really thought Donne's long poem "A Litanie" could support a New-Critical-style essay of much length. I did until he asked. In a couple of...