Volume 28, Number 19 · December 3, 1981
'There Is No Penance Due to Innocence'
By William Empson
John Donne: Life, Mind and Art
by John Carey
Oxford University Press, 303 pp., $19.95
This long, hammering book amounts to saying that no one need bother any more about Donne, because the admiration for his love poems was based on a delusion. The love poems are brief but very various and quite large in number, and they are much his best work; for most readers, they are the only memorable part of it. Carey argues that the motivation behind them is bad; once this is recognized, they can be seen to be bad poetry. The idea is not quite a novelty; an anti-Donne movement has been grumbling for some time, and this book is an explosion of it. I think it wrong, and think its causes and methods worth examining.
Review, 9604 words
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