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Article: Donne's Body.(John Donne)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
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Donne scholarship has often grappled with his urgent fixation on the body--his habit of expressing even abstract or spiritual ideas in physiological terms. In sermons, for instance, Donne speaks of the soul as having blood and bones, of the "bowells" of the spirit, and of sin as a whole organic bodily system. He also explicitly contends that soul and body are one, and that "all that the soule does, it does in, and with, and by the body." [1] Accounting for this striking materialism in a variety of ways, many critics nevertheless agree that Donne's preoccupation with the body is a form of self-absorption or "egotism." [2] They read his emphatic physicality as a powerful ...