English Poetry Lecture 9: John Donne II

RULES OF DECORUM
•Rules of Decorum are rules set by ancient critics to define what is proper and appropriate to be in poetry in both style and subject
•Roman critic & poet Horace (65 BC –8 BC), spearheaded this trend
•Horace meant to guide poets to the features that made ancient poetry, like that of Homer, great
•The Rules of Decorum were adopted from ancient Greece and Roman Literatures
•The aim of poetry was to teach/educate and delight/please
•To achieve greatness in poetry, themes, language, and forms have to elevated
SUBJECT MATTER
•Subject matters have to be sublime and elite, tackling issues of great significance to the whole society such as the gods, battles, heroes, epics, myths, kings, queens etc
•Subject matters/themes should be elite about universal truths
•To achieve decorum, mixture of forms should not happen
•For example, tragedy is tragedy and comedy is comedy

POETIC DICTION
•The language of poetry has to be highly embellished, refined, and sophisticated
•Descriptions are supposed to be pleasant, delicate, flowery, and idyllic
•Poetry has to be expressed in words or phrases that are not in ordinary conversation, but in what is known as poetic diction

FORM
•Rules of decorum dictate that a poem has to use a regular form
•Both the shape and the lines have to be well-structured
•This applies to the number of lines, the number of syllables, and even to the rhyme scheme, which has to be regular
•The sonnet in the Elizabethan age is the epitome of decorum
JOHN DONNE
•Now modernist poets & critics attack & mock the rules of decorum
•For many, these rules were limiting
•For some, the rules made poetry an elitist practice
•Therefore, parody & satire were used to undermine such rules
•Still, the attack against these rules was also against the social & poetic mainstream constructs of the time
RECEPTION OF DONNE: CONTEMPORARIES
•The rules were “strictly” followed during the Elizabethan age, 17th & 18th centuries.
•Ben Jonson: Donne “for not being understood would perish” & that “for not keeping of accent [he] deserved hanging”
•John Dryden: “Donne affects the metaphysics; and [he] perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.”
•Samuel Johnson: Donne’s poetry is “a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike... The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.”
•Alexander Pope: “Donne had no imagination, but as much wit as I think any writer can possibly have”
RECEPTION OF DONNE: MODERNISTS
• Samuel Coleridge: “Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects, where we have no right to expect—this is the wit of Donne.”
•Herbert Grierson praised Donne as “reflective”, “the most thoughtful and imaginative”, “genius” and “unconventional”
•T. S. Eliot: “a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied”. Eliot appreciated metaphysical poets’ “integration of sensation and idea”, “detached intellectuality and passion”

WOOLF ON DONNE
•Virginia Woolf: “Donne’s poems reveal a lady of a very different cast. She was brown but she was also fair; she was solitary but also sociable; she was rustic yet also fond of city life; she was sceptical yet devout, emotional but reserved — in short she was as various and complex as Donne himself.”
•For Woolf, empowering women “is one of the reasons why we still seek out Donne; why after three hundred years and more we still hear the sound of his voice speaking across the ages so distinctly”

LOVE OR RELIGIOUS POEM?
•Some critics like to read ”The Bait” as a religious poem
•In this reading, the beloved is Jesus himself
•This means that ‘sun’ in the second stanza is a pun on ‘son’

METAPHYSICAL POETRY?
•The term “metaphysical” says more about the people who used the term than about the poets described
•According to T. S. Eliot, the term metaphysical was used as a term of ‘abuse’, an insult
•In other words, the early critics did not want people to write Donne’s poetry & therefore they negatively framed him
•Now the name is stuck as a label rather than a definition
•I prefer Donne’s School & only use ‘metaphysical for convenience

JOHN DONNE SCHOOL?

•The “metaphysicals” are a group of poets led by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvel, and Henry Vaughan
•Donne wrote poetry as other poets where adopting the classical rules of decorum in writing poetry.
•But Donne was a modernist poet who sought to change both the content and form of poetry
•For t **