In 2014, the BBC held a poll to find The Nation’s Favourite Poet. It’s a difficult choice to have to make but they made it easier by providing a long list from which one had to pick. The result is here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/vote_results.shtml
I find that hard to believe but any poll can only represent the views of those who take part in it. In the 1970’s, the results of pop music votes in Smash Hits magazine weren’t expected to be the same as those in the New Musical Express or on the John Peel Show.
But I voted for John Donne. And he got up and finished second, which was a tremendous performance for someone who was 442 years old. For his contemporary, Ben Jonson, he was ‘the first poet in the world’.
I’m not sure that he is my favourite poet now and I’d need a shortlist of at least half a dozen to cover the question but he would be on it. Among my reasons for finding in favour of Donne were a sort of discipline that followed a line of ‘argument’. Critics have called it ‘wit’. It’s ‘ingenious’, it shouldn’t be assumed to be sincere or even ‘meaningful’ in any of the ways that Romantic poets insist on expressing their deep, inner feelings two hundred years later. His hyperbole is imaginative and sometimes ridiculous if taken literally but it is playful. In later life he is quoted as having said, ‘I did best when I had least truth for my subjects’.
In the Elegies, there is much use of paradox in defence of preposterous arguments such as a prisoner being locked up like a precious jewel. His line of argument in The Anagram, that his ‘mistress’,
hath but an anagram of a good face
and that her lack of beauty is to be valued above good looks, is from a period well after the Age of Chivalry and well before that of Political Correctness. He is being contrary, of course, and often re-working themes from Classical literature.
Reading him again now, it is impressive how he uses such simple words in constructing his lines of thought. There’s a high percentage of monosyllabic words but he makes them work for him, knows that big, long words aren’t as clever as they look and that short words fit better into his metrical patterns.
He was credited with using ‘language such as men do use’ rather than ‘poetic’ language that the likes of Edmund Spenser might be accused of but he wasn’t the first or last to be thought to do that as throughout the ages poetry has always had poets trying to reclaim the language from mannerisms that poetry appeared to have fallen into. I don’t know where ‘poetry’ should be on that range of options between being a ‘memorable speech’ or ‘a heightened form of language’ and that attempt to remain authentic. Each poet or poem decides for itself.
But Donne is regarded as a ‘metaphysical poet’ and so it might be useful to know what that means. I should know because I was asked to say what it meant at University about 40 years ago. Now, my reply would care less for making a good impression and making my way towards a BA (Hons) and prefer to tell it as it is and I’d say it doesn’t matter whether a poet is Romantic, Movement, Modernist or Metaphysical but whether what they do is any good but academics are like that. They invent terms and then others take them apart.
The Poetry Foundation website says,
A group of 17th-century poets whose works are marked by philosophical exploration, colloquial diction, ingenious conceits, irony, and metrically flexible lines. Topics of interest often included love, religion, and morality, which the metaphysical poets considered through unusual comparisons, frequently employing unexpected similes and metaphors in displays of wit.
That’s fair enough but as soon as we’ve established as much, it is the habit of commentators to say how their subject is not like that at all. Donne was well served by two excellent critiques in John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, published in 1981, and J.B. Leishman’s The Monarch of Wit from 1951. I don’t know if anything better has been published on the subject since but they remain great books in some ways as rewarding as the poems themselves.
Leishman sets out to show that Donne and Ben Jonson weren’t contemporary opposites but were both C17th poets but as well as degrading the significance of being ‘metaphysical’, he stresses how different Donne’s attitude to poetry was compared to C20th attitudes and, now, C21st poets who, since Keats, Wordsworth and those effete, self-indulgent Romantics (my words, nobody else’s), have come to value individual expression, the finding of a ‘voice’ and the preciousness of the poet’s feelings or sincerity.
Donne wouldn’t have understood what we are on about and didn’t even care to preserve his own poems as we do, just showing off his latest exhibition of wordplay among his circle of erudite friends and only ever publishing the Anniversaries, out of all his poems, in his lifetime.
Donne, the Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs is an excellent biography, published in 2006. The title summarizes Donne’s career from the young man about town who seemed to regard himself as something of a ‘ladies’ man’ to the post of Dean of St. Paul’s. The portrait in the National Gallery shows him posing as a ‘distracted lover’. His rise to eminence was held back by some years when he married Ann who was younger and considered by some an inappropriate match. Izaak Walton in the biography he published in 1640 observed that ‘love is a flattering mischief’ and Donne’s sidelined career made him reflect,
When
in Paris he saw the ghost of his wife walk through his room carrying a baby and
subsequently a messenger arrived from London to tell him that she had given
birth to a stillborn child.
The job he really wanted was Ambassador to Venice but he was appointed to St. Paul’s and took it seriously and became famous for his sermons. Having come from a Catholic family, as Shakespeare is widely also thought to have done, he was well advised to adopt the new religion after his brother, Henry, was arrested on a charge of harbouring a priest but died of plague in prison in 1593 before coming to trial. His increasingly devout attitude seems to have been at least in part augmented by the grief he felt at Ann’s death at the age of 33 in 1617. She had been 17 when they married in 1601; Donne was probably 29. Of the twelve children they had together, seven had survived.
While Shakespeare is dubiously credited with taking a darker turn in his work after the death of his supposed son, Hamnet, closely followed by that of his father, Donne’s pre-occupation with death from then onwards has more convincing biographical justification.
Chichester
Cathedral Library has a book signed by him, not a poetry book but a religious
tract in Latin which they have because he was a friend of the Bishop of
Chichester and left his books to him. I must have looked trustworthy when
asking to see it on an Open Day some years ago, was allowed to handle it, take
a photo of it and was left alone with it. It would be hard to put a value on,
one would imagine.
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The Songs and Sonets are the obvious place to start in the poems with The Flea being a good example of how they, Donne’s poems and ‘metaphysical poetry’ work.
And this is seasonal, as well as sensational,
A
Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day
I’m grateful to PPS for having him on the programme because it has reminded me to go back and have a better look at him. I do have the sermons in a book which have so far looked too forbidding to read and, looking at the Complete Poems, there is far more to him than I’ve read and so a couple of days need setting by to set about some of that.
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