> I have never read Donne, but I saw the film Wit last
> night where his
> poetry figures large. He sounded very interesting.
Back when I was building the cognitive infrastructure I would spend many subsequent years dismantling, I wrote my senior critical thesis-piece on Donne and Auden. Auden, too, was an amazing love poet.
For those newly or not yet acquainted, Eliot makes Donne sound interesting--as if he needed it--in the following, from his essay "The Metaphysical Poets," with its famous formulation of an historical "dissociation of sensibility":
". . . It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. . . ."
On a side note, your brother, Michael, is Bob Perelman, right? Early nineties I used to carry _The Trouble With Genius_ around with me, absorbing it at temp jobs, and looking for his poetry in Sulfur and Avec and the like. I pulled "Just / Like / Me" off the internet the other night--very nice. Have you talked with him much about what it was like writing and organizing for the NEA?
Alec
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com