"All this seed pearl": John Donne and Bodily Presence

This article argues that John Donne's engagement with and privileging of the body lies at the creative core of his work. Donne's poetry and prose courts heresy and generates drama as he elevates the body to a status equal with or even superior to the soul, a crucial component of selfhood that is ultimately key not only to earthly but heavenly life. It is in the bodily self, with its sexuality, its illness, and its promise of resurrection, that this consummate "metaphysical" poet locates the soul and the treasures of its existence.