Features Of Aestheticism In John Donne’s Poetry

John Donne is an important poet during the period of English Renaissance in the 17 th century. He is a man of great learning and hyperactive thought, which determines the complexity of his thought and the richness of artistic techniques. Donne’s poetry works very different with that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Most of Elizabethan poetry strive for exquisite carve and the luxuriance images, but by using a conceit of more intelligence, Donne blends the secularity with the sacred world and integrates passion with reason, creating the extremely condensed and novel images and injecting new vitality into poetry. Donne not only boldly experiments on the images and ideas, but also innovates on the rhythm of the poetry and verse form. Donne’s poetry conveys his care for humane love and implicitly expresses the contradictory inner world of the author and the discontent and resistance to the mainstream values in the era of fierce social changes.As a literary trend, or poetic genre, aestheticism flourished in the period of social transformation from mid-19 th century to the late 19 th century. Its pursuit of the beauty of pure form, the absolutization of individual spirit and the redemption of earthly life extends the performing methods of literature and arts, broaden the aesthetic vision of arts and provides a new research perspective of literature and arts. Aestheticism is the infancy of modernistic criticism and creative practice.Although aestheticism has been declining so far for its contradictions and decadent tendencies, its impact is still fresh. Concerning modern poetic criticism is not only inseparable from Donne’s metaphysical poetry, but also from the germinal inspiration of aestheticism. Taking aestheticism and other western literary criticism as a guide, this thesis is divided into three chapters demonstrating the aesthetic qualities of Donne’s poetry and its fit with the aestheticism in cultural background, artistic skills, thematic connotation and other aspects to explore the features of aestheticism in John Donne’s poetry.Chapter One analyzes Donne’s poetry in terms of the overall artistic appeal. Section A focuses on the fusion of secularity and divinity which reflects the realm integrating soul and flesh in Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Section B discusses the combination of rationality and emotion in Donne’s poetry, which coincides with the aestheticism claim that considers the rational contents on the basis of sensitivity and the subjective beauty of formal and even seeking at performing aesthetic ideas through the language beauty.Chapter Two discusses the originality of artistic techniques in Donne’s poetry. Section A analyses the diverse metrics of Donne’s poetry from aspects of prosody, syntax and poetic composition with specific examples, which reflects the “form-oriented” and the pursuit of formal beauty of aestheticism. Section B discusses the defamiliarization of imagery in Donne’s poetry. The novel and grotesque imagery as well as the odd metaphor embodies subjective aesthetic experience and subjective imagination in the creation of aestheticism.Chapter Three discusses the rebelliousness of connotation in Donne’s poetry which has something in common with aestheticism. Section A probes the interpretation of perfect love in Donne’s love poetry which contains the integration of soul and flesh. This concept of love has a striking resemblance with the artistic idea in Pre-Raphaelite poetry, showing the humanistic atmosphere of Donne’s poetry. Section B mainly discusses Donne’s dissatisfaction and revolt to the instability of the religious situation and the moral imprisonment in the separation between soul and flesh. Donne’s struggle in the religious poetry shows almost the same resistant characteristics with aestheticism that emerges from an age in which Christianity system has been shaken and aims at rejecting the social dogmatism and hypocrisy. Section C points out that whether in love poetry or religious poetry, the unity of humanity and divinity with the latter as the dominant is similar with the aesthetic relying on “beauty” and “God” for salvation. Donne relies on God to complete redemption, which is a kind of rebelling characteristics of idealization.