The Writings of John Donne Essays -- Biography Biographies Essays

The 17th coke opened with a generation of great social change which culminated in the eventual execution of King Charles I in 1649. This created an atmosphere of divergence that permeates much of the literature of the period. The writings of John Donne are rife with this conflict, reflecting in their content a look out of love and women radic tout ensembley and cynically altered from that which preceding generations of poets had handed wad.   John Donnes view of love deviated greatly from the chivalrous philosophy of courtly love, which had been expressed in poetry handed down from the sonnets of such poetic giants as Sidney and Petrarch. The general verse until then had focused greatly on the unrivalled importance of love in the scope of the life of the poet (or his creations voice). Until then, love had consisted mostly of an obsession with one woman, and an exploration of the feelings and situations that this caused in the narrator.   Donnes reversal of that in troversion came in the form of an intellectual exploration of the record of his relationships themselves. His verses often point out the selfishness inherent to new love, as in The Good-Morrow. In this poem, Donnes focus is on the exploration of the new world, which he then twists around to imply that his entire world is formed between his woman of the street and himself. Love makes one room an everywhere. (l. 10) His poetic conceit (conception) is an explication of the emotional conceit (vanity) underlying love. A clearer example of the universalization of love is regulaten in The Sun Rising with the lines She is all states, and all princes I,/Nothing else is. (ll. 21-22) With the equal weight of both his mistress and Donnes part, we see a much more balan... ...iewed as equals without the risk of disrupting social norms. stock-still he still attempts to work against the grain of this doctrine.   These social norms had been established in poetry for several hundreds of ye ars when Donne began his work breaking them down. Working against such conventions in the perception of love and women, Donne radically altered his poetry to prevail both a more human and more equal view of both. In the end, the effect of these changes may have been lost for a a few(prenominal) centuries, as his poetry was swept aside and not embraced until the onset of Modernism, simply perhaps, given the underlying misogyny of his poetry, this was for the best. Going from the diminutive extreme to the only if distrusted extreme may have been a more frightening alternate(a) for womens history than the more gradual climb from silence we now carry of.