In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged 'metaphysical' poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having 'discovered' Donne himself. John Donne in the Nineteenth Century tracks the myriad ways in which 'Donne' was lodged in literary culture in the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be 'in the hands of every reader'; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of the only edition ever called The Works, which reprinted the sermons of 'Dr Donne'. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the 'fleshly school' of poets, and by self-consciously 'decadent' writers of the fin de siècle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the seventeenth-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called 'the masterpiece of English biography'.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics have predominantly offered a negative estimate of John Donne’s Metempsychosis. In contrast, this study of Metempsychosis re-evaluates the poem as one of the most vital and energetic of Donne’s canon. Siobhán Collins appraises Metempsychosis for its extraordinary openness to and its inventive portrayal of conflict within identity. She situates this ludic verse as a text alert to and imbued with the Elizabethan fascination with the processes and properties of metamorphosis. Contesting the pervasive view that the poem is incomplete, this study illustrates how Metempsychosis is thematically linked with Donne’s other writings through its concern with the relationship between body and soul, and with temporality and transformation. Collins uses this genre-defying verse as a springboard to contribute significantly to our understanding of early modern concerns over the nature and borders of human identity, and the notion of selfhood as mutable and in process. Drawing on and contributing to recent scholarly work on the history of the body and on sexuality in the early modern period, Collins argues that Metempsychosis reveals the oft-violent processes of change involved in the author’s personal life and in the intellectual, religious and political environment of his time. She places the poem’s somatic representations of plants, beasts and humans within the context of early modern discourses: natural philosophy, medical, political and religious. Collins offers a far-reaching exploration of how Metempsychosis articulates philosophical inquiries that are central to early modern notions of self-identity and moral accountability, such as: the human capacity for autonomy; the place of the human in the ’great chain of being’; the relationship between cognition and embodiment, memory and selfhood; and the concept of wonder as a distinctly human phenomenon.

A reimagining of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine. In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that recorded his near-death experience during a deadly epidemic in London. Four hundred years later, in the aftermath of our own pandemic, Harvey and Harrison show how Devotions crystalizes the power, beauty, and enduring strangeness of Donne’s thinking. Arguing that Donne saw human life in light of emergent ideas in the study of nature (physics) and the study of the body (physick), John Donne’s Physics reveals Devotions as a culminating achievement, a radically new literary form that uses poetic techniques to depict Donne’s encounter with death in a world transformed by new discoveries and knowledge systems.

Investigations into how the brain actually works have led to remarkable discoveries and these findings carry profound implications for interpreting literature. This study applies recent breakthroughs from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology in order to deepen our understanding of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets.

Scientific Discourse in John Donne’s Eschatological Poetry offers a compelling critique of John Donne’s religious and erotic poetry, focusing on the intersection of two seemingly antithetical discourses: the language of the scientific revolution and of Christian eschatology. Throughout its three chapters, which correspond to three scientific disciplines – cartography, physics and alchemy – the volume examines the ways in which the references to early modern and medieval science in Donne’s poetry contribute to conceptualizing the Christian mystery of death.

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions change in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Typically categorized as 'literary' writers Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton and John Milton were all active in the period's reappraisal of the single emotion that, due to their efforts, would become the passion most associated with the writing life: melancholy. By emphasising the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by these figures, Douglas Trevor asserts that quintessentially 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes shape the methods by which these same writers come to analyse their own moods. He also examines early modern medical texts, dramaturgical representations of learned depressives such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the opposition to materialistic accounts of the passions voiced by Neoplatonists such as Edmund Spenser.

Essays on many of the most important literary figures of the 16th and 17th centuries

This volume provides essays by twenty-nine leading scholars and critics on the best English poets from Chaucer to Larkin.