Donne''s @quot;Anniversaries@quot; and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode
ISBN: 9781400870059
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter



In his occasional poetry, and especially in his two elegaic Anniversary poems, Donne created a special symbolic mode in seventeenth-century poetry of praise and compliment. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's reading of the Anniversary poems recognizes them as complex mixed-genre works which weld together formal, thematic, and structural elements from the occasional poem of praise, the funeral elegy, the funeral sermon, the hymn, the anatomy, and the Protestant meditation.

Focusing especially on theme and structure, her reading demonstrates the coherent symbolic method and meaning of these poems and also their careful logical articulation, both as individual poems and as companion pieces. Essentially, the author discovers their thorough and precise exploration, through the poetic means of figure and symbol, of the nature of man and the conditions of human life.

In order to discuss the significant contexts for and influences on the Anniversary poems, the author has studied sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epideictic theory and practice, Protestant meditation, Biblical hermencutics, and funeral sermons. She is also concerned with the effect of the poems, and of Donne's other writings of a similar kind, on contemporary and subsequent developments in the poetry of praise, especially that of Marvell and Dryden. This is a lucid and learned book that provides a major context for the Anniversary poems and gives new significance to the designation of Donne as a Metaphysical poet.

Originally published in 1973.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Barbara Josephine Kiefer Lewalski was born in Topeka, Kansas on February 22, 1931. She received a bachelor of science degree in education and a master's degree from Kansas State Teachers College and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. She began her academic career as an instructor at Wellesley College and went on to become the first woman to be granted tenured and endowed professorships in the English departments of Brown University and Harvard University.

She was a Renaissance scholar and expert on the poet John Milton. She wrote numerous books including Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained; Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms; Writing Women in Jacobean England; and The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 1979. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Renaissance Society of America in 2016. She died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018 at the age of 87.

(Bowker Author Biography)


hidden image for function call