John Donne Coterie Poet

Arthur F. Marotti has produced the first systematic study of John Donnes poetry as coterie literature offering fresh interpretations of the poems in their biographical and sociohistorical contexts. It will be of interest and value to students and scholars of English Renaissance literature to critics interested in the application of revisionist history to literary study and to those concerned with the processes by which literature became institutionalized in the early modern period. Donne treated poetry as an avocation restricting his verse to carefully chosed readers: friends acquaintances patrons and the woman he later married. This study employs socio-historical and psychoanalytic methods to examine this poetry as work designed for readers to respond in knowledgeable ways to a complex interplay of literary text and social context. Marotti argues that it is necessary to relate literary language to the languages of social economic and political transactions and to define the social and ideological affiliations of literary genres and modes. After setting Donnes practice in the framework of the sixteenth-century systems of manuscript literary transmission Marotti treats the verse chronologically and according to audience paying particular attention to the rhetorical enactment of the authors relationships to peers and superiors through the conflicting styles of egalitarian assertion social iconoclasm and deferential politeness. Marotti relates the poetry to Donnes contemporary prose discussing the authors choice of various literary forms in the context of his sociopolitical life as well in terms of the shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean rule the latter change resulting in a realignment of genres within the cultures literary system. He reads Donnes formal satires humanist verse letters erotic elegies and commentary epistles aware of the social coordinates of those particular genres and defines the markedly different circumstances to which Donnes libertine courtly satiric sentimental complimentary and religious lyrics individually belonged. Marotti deals also with Donnes inventive mixing of genres in both shorter and longer poems. Marottis groundbreaking work offers new models of historical interpretation of Donnes poetry complementing previous formalist intellectual-historical and literary-historical readings. It particularly highlights the importance of attending to the socioliterary conditions of literature designed for manuscript transmission rather than for publication work that includes for example much of the lyric poetry of Renaissance England. Marotti recreates the conditions of coterie writing convincingly and the poetry gives up more of its secrets as a result. --Graham Parry London Times Higher Education Supplement . . . a study which no serious student of Donne can ignore. --Cedric C. Brown Review of English Studies . . . a thought-provoking and lucid volume that illuminates both the poetry and the social and autobiographical forces behind it. . . . [Marotti] frees Donne form the constraining boxes in which many other critics have crammed his work and in so doing offers a significant new reading of his entire poetic canon. --Heather Dubrow Renaissance Quarterly This is a powerful testament to Donnes poetic achievement and as an account of a poetic career in an unsettled manuscript culture it is a definitive statement of the man the occasions and the work. --Arthur F. Kinney The Centennial Review Arthur F. Marotti Professor of English at Wayne State University has written three books on Early Modern English literature and culture most recently Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourse in Early Modern England (2005).