John Donne: Love and Voices in the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets.

Abstract

This thesis argues that Donne's Elegies and Songs and Sonnets found a readership trained to appreciate his words. It draws on the work of Wolfgang Iser. Iser particularly looks at the importance of a text providing a space in which the reader can imagine possibilities that extend his or her world. It is through voices that Donne connects with his readers, and creates worlds and spaces that they can explore. As his poetic control matures, Donne increasingly lives inside the poetic worlds he creates. At first, in the Elegies, his speaker is the societal observer and participant. Through this speaker, Donne will increasingly seek to educate his readers, and have them imagine new ways to approach life and love. In the Elegies, women will be the touchstone against which men measure their worth. In the Songs and Sonnets the speaker develops to be Donne himself, and the measure of worth will change to be the prospect of an androgynous, balanced, constant love. Donne explores the nature of what such a reciprocal love might look like, pushes rhetoric almost to breaking point, and seeks poetic solutions to the questions a challenging world poses. It is Donne's developing awareness of the power of voice that allows him to structure his world, finally face the agonizing loss of Anne, and contemplate a life with God. An awareness of biographical context will at times help to more fully understand his poetry. And it is voices, both real and imagined, that offer the reader the chance to participate in making meaning in that poetry.