John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist.

Description

42 pages
Contains Photos, Bibliography
$9.95
ISBN 978-1-55380-065-1
DDC 821'.3

Publisher

Ronsdale Press

Year

2008

Contributor

Reviewed by Laila Abdalla

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Review

The University of British Columbia’s Garnett Sedgewick Lectures invite annually an accomplished scholar in the field of English literature to deliver a lecture in his or her field of expertise. The 2008 speaker was Dr. Paul Stanwood, UBC Professor Emeritus, whose field is English early modern literature. His topic was early seventeenth-century poet John Donne, and the reception of Donne’s poetry across the ages. This short book consists mainly of the lecture in written form.

Donne was famed in his own time: his sermons as dean of St. Paul’s were extolled and his poetry hailed as intellectually pithy and dexterous. He was ingenious at wordplay and the manipulation of complex abstractions, and he was particularly admired for his conceits, or metaphors, that put to use both these faculties. During his lifetime and beyond, his extraordinary and novel fashion of poetry prompted a series of imitators, some of whom were almost as good as he, but many of whom were inferior. This brand of poetry, termed “metaphysical,” became unpopular in the late 1600s, and it was not until the modernist movement in the early twentieth century that it was rediscovered and once more lauded for its inventiveness.

Dr. Stanwood’s lecture is an erudite and eloquent historical contextualization of the changing concept of “wit,” starting at the time of Donne in the 1600s and ending just after the mid-1900s. Stanwood’s argument is an intriguing and convincing one: those eras that privileged rhetorical and world-view simplicity and unity ignored Donne’s verse, while those that perceived both language and the world as complex or disjointed favoured it. Stanwood further claims that Donne was a man of his own time, but also a “modernist” in the sense that he modernized the aesthetics of poetry that were current at his own time. In his discussion, Stanwood frequently quotes Donne’s poetry, as well that of his imitators, both good and bad.

The lecture’s nature of historical survey accompanied by literary analysis offers insight to scholars as much as new students of Donne. Indeed, because of its clear ordering and lack of obfuscating language, the text will also be informative to the interested layperson.

Citation

Stanwood, P.G., “John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist.,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed September 20, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/26608.