John Donne And Metaphysical Tradition

In recent decades, John Donne (1572-1631) and Metaphysical Poetry have been a hot topic home and broad. Different angles related to his works have been touched upon such as from the points of view of religion, rhyme, psychology and love. Unfortunately elaboration from these angles is quite vague and hard for Chinese students. In China, there have been few essays about Donne, even less about the tradition that Donne inherited and left to the poets of the next centuries. This paper tries to trace the tradition of John Donne. As far as the poetry of John Donne is concerned, it lies squarely within the English tradition. The reader can be positive that Donne was interested in the past both by what he followed and more importantly, by what he rejected and ridiculed. He took some of the Renaissance ideas that had been overused and reinvigorated them. Many of his poems deal with conventional Petrarchan subjects: love, sadness, separation. Yet Donne turns tradition upside-down, or inside-out, by employing the elaborate conceit and by intellectualizing emotion, traits that would become his trademarks. The author, first of all. hopes to touch upon the life of Donne that left great influence upon his writing as he was an apostasy both in his belief and in his works from Jack Donne, the lover of ladies and the theatre, to Dr Donne, the great preacher. He was in the first place a Catholic. Our textbooks make so little of the English Catholics that one is apt to forget they ever existed or justimagine as if Catholic were a merely political problem. The author of the paper also endeavours to present various views on the key word "metaphysics" in order to give further explanation about its characteristics, such as paradox, conceit and wit. Much effort has been laid on the explanation of images in Donne's poetry in which the author wishes to provide some clues to fully understand the poetry of metaphysical tradition.