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Donne Criticism 286 Views
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Description:
Critics started attacking Donne's works only after he had passed away. Talk about kicking a guy when he's already down.
Transcript
- 00:01
Donne: Criticism, a la Shmoop. John Donne’s one of those guys who makes
- 00:09
you feel like you’re not doing anything with your own life. Yeah… one of those.
- 00:15
He traveled across Europe and fought against the Spanish.
- 00:19
He was imprisoned for marrying Anne More without her dad's permission.
- 00:23
He transformed himself from a broke lawyer into a prominent preacher.
Full Transcript
- 00:28
And, of course, he wrote poetry. The anonymous editor of a 1633 edition of
- 00:34
Donne's work, published two years after the poet's death, praised his ability to rhyme
- 00:39
the word “dead” with “discovered” and “determined.”
- 00:46
The editor also went on to say that Donne's poetry was the most awesome thing to happen
- 00:50
to English literature ever, never mind that Shakespeare guy.
- 00:54
Other people must have agreed with this assessment, because the poems were reprinted multiple
- 00:59
times during the seventeenth century. Yet, at the same time, a number of critics
- 01:07
and other poets turned against Donne.
- 01:09
The dude was dead; it's not like he could defend himself.
- 01:12
The anti-Donne camp disliked the irregular rhythm and weird imagery of his poetry.
- 01:17
Dryden, an influential seventeenth-century poet who wrote a lot of stuff you've never
- 01:22
heard of, spoke for many when he referred dismissively to Donne's “rough cadence”.
- 01:26
By the time Samuel Johnson was writing his Dictionary of the English Language in the
- 01:34
eighteenth century, Donne was really out of fashion… much like shoulder pads and mullets
- 01:38
are today.
- 01:40
Johnson thought metaphysical poetry like Donne's was interesting, but that it also had some
- 01:44
serious problems. Donne groupies remained scarce on the ground
- 01:49
during the nineteenth century, when free-flowing, sensuous Romantic poetry was what got people
- 01:54
all… hot and bothered.
- 01:59
Who wanted to wrestle with the irony of Donne's poetry when you could read a pretty little
- 02:02
lyrical sonnet about a nightingale instead?
- 02:08
Robert Chambers, a nineteenth-century critic, directed a particularly nasty piece of commentary
- 02:13
at Donne's poems.
- 02:14
They were, in his opinion, “cold and forced conceits, mere vain workings of the intellect.”
- 02:21
Chambers also concluded that the poets of Queen Elizabeth the First's time, like Shakespeare,
- 02:26
could out-sonnet Donne any day of the week. Oh, snap.
- 02:31
Then came the Victorians, a notoriously prudish bunch, who objected to the frank sexuality
- 02:37
in some of Donne's poetry.
- 02:39
Fleas and lovers in bed together? What next? Sheep? Dogs? Smoky the Bear?
- 02:45
It wasn't until the Scottish literary scholar and critic Herbert Grierson edited his collection
- 02:50
of metaphysical poetry in 1912 that Donne's reputation began to revive.
- 02:57
Donne was given an additional boost in 1921, when T.S. Eliot published his essay on metaphysical
- 03:02
poetry.
- 03:04
After that, Donne was well on his way to a spectacular re-evaluation as one of England's
- 03:10
most inventive and formative poets.
- 03:14
In your eye, Robert Chambers.
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