Social Context in the Poetry of John Donne

Social Context in the Poetry of John Donne

Contemporary literary theory has thoroughly debunked the traditional view of the artist as a divinely inspired, completely original and creative individual. This view has been replaced with the more apt view of the author as a product of his or her environment and the existing discourses of the society in which he or she lives. In this new attitude toward the writer as a product of society, the author is considered, according to Dr. James E. Porter, as somewhat of a quiltmaker who takes various traces of the existing cultural intertext (the collected writing and debate of a society) and combines them in new ways to create new discourse (34). Differences in these new discourses of various authors are the result of existing debates concerning the dominant ideology of a particular society. While this theory of writing may be recent, it applies to the literature and the writers of all historical periods, including the Seventeenth century. By looking at two poems by John Donne, namely "The Canonization" and "The Flea," we can see how existing societal debates and beliefs create literature.

At the time of the writing of "The Canonization" and "The Flea," around the turn of the seventeenth century, one of the biggest debates in English society concerned who was responsible for the choice of a mate and what the criteria should be the basis for marriage. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, it had been traditional for the parents in the upper classes to be the sole source of marital decisions with their child having no say in the selection process and little if any say in the approval of a proposed match (Stone 70). These arranged marriages tended to be based solely on the accu...

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...e historical and social context of a poem can one truly see all of the dynamics at work within a poem. These analytical methods may not simplify the process of reading and interpreting literature, but they provide a greater depth of understanding and appreciation that should be of interest to students of literature.

Works Cited

Donne, John. "The Canonization." The Literature of Renaissance England. Ed. John Hollander and Frank Kermode. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 526-27.

Donne, John. "The Flea." The Literature of Renaissance England. Ed. John Hollander and Frank Kermode. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 534-35.

Porter, James. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review Fall 1986: 34-47.

Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500- 1800. Abr. Ed. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979.