Donne’s Artistic Identity

The book, Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, edited by Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. is a very nice collection of scholarly articles about various Early Modern poets. One section of this book that was of particular interest to me was an article Andrew Hadfield called, “Donne’s Songs and Sonets and Artistic Identity. The article examines the posthumous collection of Donne’s poetry, which was published under the title Songs and Sonets. The posthumous nature of the collection is something that Hadfield is particularly concerned with examining in this article — as he is trying to construct something of an understanding of who Donne is speaking as, and who he is speaking to in some of the poems that appear in this collection.

Among other things, Hadfield is committed to a certain degree of ambiguity in the way that scholars encounter and attempt to understand these poems. He points out that very little of Donne’s poetry was published during his life, but that much of it was circulated among groups of his friends. This means that Donne’s poetry was not written with the public at large in mind and what may have been clear to groups of Donne’s friends was not clear to the original audiences of the printed work and has become even less clear to us today, as time has separated us from the context of Donne’s poetry. Hadfield makes the point that the poems collected in Songs and Sonnets probably came from a variety of sources, and thus are much better understood not as a cohesive whole, but as many individual poems that may have been addressed to many different audiences. Hadfield furthermore challenges some of the long-held assumptions that most of Donne’s poetry was addressed to groups of men in courtly spheres, and submits that many of his poems may have been written with a female audience in mind as well.

In trying to understand Donne’s original audiences a little better Hadfield is especially concerned to address many scholar’s accusations of Donne’s rampant misogyny. Hadfield’s argument that many of Donne’s readers may have been women is added to by the thought that many of his poems that seem misogynistic may be so constructed as creating a sarcastic commentary on some of the attitudes of the time. Hadfield also offers a different reading of “The Flea” from the traditional understanding, arguing that the poem may be addressed to his wife, and so in the second stanza, when Donne claims to be married to the one he is addressing, he may in fact be in earnest.