A Study Of John Donne’s Conceits

The metaphysical poets of the Renaissance have made a profound influence on the development of English poetry. John Donne is the forefather and important representative of metaphysical poetry in the17th century. In his poems, Donne, while not relaxing his grasp on the realities of the love-experience, suffuses it with an emotional intensity and a spiritualized ardor unique in English poetry. This astonishing new poetry took the literary cliques of London by storm. Donne illumines or emphasizes his thought by fantastic metaphors and extravagant hyperboles instead of decorating his theme by conventional comparisons. The "conceits", as these extravagant figures are called, are so odd, that we lose sight of the thing to be illustrated, in the startling nature of the illustration.This essay is divided into three chapters, followed by a conclusion.Chapter one explores how Donne defamiliarises himself in a way of thinking. His defamiliarisation is presented in his view of human being and in his view of animals and plants. Human being is always lowered in his poem. In other words, the human being is dehumanized. In his opinion, man is inferior to the insects, animals and plants. Man is nothing. As a matter of fact, he is despaired at the fallen state of the human being. His real goal is to raise the status of the human being. By defamiliarisation, he draws the readers" attention and prolongs his artfulness. On the contrary, the animals and plants are given much more emphasis in Donne’s poetry. Sometimes, the animals and plants have the religious importance.Chapter two endeavors to emphasize Donne’s conceits as a rhetorical device. His conceits as a rhetorical device are explained in two aspects of an extended metaphor and a profound comparison. At first, he uses familiar things to illustrate love and the religious ideas, then he defamiliarises them. He transfigures many images from their conventional uses. The metaphor adopted in his poetry is unique, which is beyond our imagination. It is easy for us to find comparison in Donne’s poems.Chapter three is devoted to a study of how Donne makes a striking effect in explicating conceits as ideological surprise, psychological revelation and philological violence. Donne’s poems are of novelty, which brings us many surprises. We are shocked that the two disparate things can have similarities in Donne’s poetry. Due to the images, such as a flea, a circle and etc., Donne reveals his passion for love, his guilty for his dead wife, his pious feeling for God and so on in his poetry. In order to show his intensified and passionate feeling, Donne adopts very peculiar language, which is violent and crude. He challenges the convention. His ancestors have the idea that sun is the king of the world, which shines on us. Donne defamiliarises the sun image. In his eyes, sun is a disturber to his and his mistress’love and sun is old and fool.The conclusion discusses the good and the bad aspects of Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarisation. Defamiliarisation helps us to have a good understanding of Donne’s poetry, while it has its limits. And then, the essay points out that Donne is a realistic poet. He doesn’t emphasize on romance and mythology. All the images he adopts are familiar to the secular people and the language he uses is common. He has a great influence on later poets, who take the nutrition from Donne’s creation.