John Donne and Baroque Allegory

Hugh Grady is Professor Emeritus of English at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania. His published works include The Modernist Shakespeare (1992), Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne (2002), and Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2009). He has also edited four critical anthologies and published a number of articles, most of which have investigated ways in which contemporary critical theory can be applied to works of early modern literature.

'Grady carefully rehearses the critical transition from the modernist to the postmodernist Donne, which he describes as essentially the transition from aesthetic unity to fragmentation. He also reviews all or most previous attempts to situate Donne's poetics in the perspective of baroque art, which leads to a fairly exhaustive review of major critics from T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Cleanth Brooks through Anthony Mazzeo, Mario Praz, and Louis Martz.' Catherine Gimelli Martin, Modern Philology

• 1. Walter Benjamin and John Donne: constellations of past and present; 2. The Anniversaries as baroque allegory: mourning, idealization, and the resistance to unity; 3. Donne's The Songs and Sonnets: living in a fragmented world; 4. Allegorical objects and metaphysical conceits: thinking about Donne's tropes with Benjamin; 5. The metaphysics of correspondence or a fragmented world? Baroque poetics in the seventeenth century; 6. Conclusion.