'Incorporated into the body of the world': A reconsideration of John Donne

In recent years, Heather Dubrow, Annabel Patterson, and David Norbrook, among others, have begun a rehabilitation of the overridingly ambitious and power-hungry portrait of John Donne popularized by John Carey. In this dissertation, I attempt to continue the interrogation into the history, politics, religion and culture of Donne's time which provide the most convincing evidence for any new understanding of Donne. I argue that Donne's commitment to a church, his role as a courtier, his vocation as a clergyman, and his relationships with women demonstrate an integrity not always recognized in current criticism.;Leaving the Roman Catholic church did not mean, to Donne, choosing hell. I examine several possibilities available to Roman Catholics living in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England, including becoming a church papist, a militant Catholic, a loyalist Catholic, or embracing the English church as their own. Evidence of Donne's relation to these Roman Catholic communities comes from Pseudo-Martyr, the Essays in Divinity and "Satire 3." Furthermore, throughout Donne's search for both secular and ecclesiastic patronage, he exercises a discretion which helps him negotiate the competing demands of praise and criticism. This discretion appears as a middle ground between silence (the coward's position) and rash speech (which could force one's authorities into silencing the speaker after all). I examine Donne's "Elegy on Prince Henry" as an example of Donne's careful praise of a prince and advice to a king. To decipher Donne's sense of himself as a clergyman, I examine several sermons, most notably his 1622 defense of James's Directions to Preachers. Finally, as I counter Carey's portrait of Donne domineering women, whose identities shrink before such self-centered egotism, I explore two traditions which Donne adapts to his poetry: the Christian Neoplatonic understanding of a self-sufficient yet nurturing God and the medieval and Renaissance traditions of eye imagery in love relationships.