An Exploration Of John Donne’s Poetic Art From The Theory Of Cognitive Poetics

John Donne is well-known for his metaphysical poetry. The thesis would like to focus on how the qualities work in his poems in terms of the forming of the poetic art with the help of the related theory within the cognitive poetics. So the thesis is presented as follows:Chapter One touches upon the unconventional mode of thinking within schema theory. Donne frequently applied the unconventional logic to the poems so that the readers’ existing knowledge would be challenged. As a result, the schema disruption may happen during the cognitive process, which allowed the readers to experience the novelty in his poems.Chapter Two highlights the prominent images using figure and ground theory. Donne preferred to choose the unexpected images or unique devices to the images to make them prominent. Consequently, the foregrounding images immediately become the figure which attracted more attention and delivered the emotions of the poem.Chapter Three aims to expound the irregular rhythm with the employment of perception-oriented theory of metre. The massive irregularities of poetic forms all aim to create the twisted rhythm so as to match with the complex emotions. That is to say, the readers are able to find out the solutions depending on the certain context. Meanwhile, they could not avoid considering the relation between the rhythm and the complex emotion in cognitive process.Conclusion summarizes the thesis. The qualities of unconventional mode of thinking, prominent images and irregular rhythm allow readers to experience novelty and surprising effects as well as render Donne unique at his times. In a word, these unique qualities contribute to the production of the metaphysical art in Donne’s poetry.