John Donne

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the life and works of John Donne. The paper examines Donne's fascination with the theme of death, which is prevalent in all his literary works. The paper explores the impact the death of Donne's wife had on his views of death. The paper contends that her death in childbirth profoundly affected Donne's writing.

From the Paper:

"There can be no question that one of the central themes of John Donne's work, in poetry and prose, is death. Not for nothing did a recent academic biographer of Donne devote an entire chapter to his subject's attitude towards, uses of, and presentation of, the theme of death (Carey 229ff). As a writer concerned with both the intensely spiritual and the intensely physical, death was a natural focus of Donne's thought and work throughout his life; as a Christian, convinced of the reality of resurrection and salvation, death was in a sense the fixed point around which his world-view revolved. Donne's fixation with the body, with its physical substance, its relationship to the outside world and its role as an expression of the divine, relates powerfully and inevitably to his conception of the significance of the body's physical dissolution in death and the consequences of this for the soul (Selleck 150-1)."

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