John Donne | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 37 pages of analysis & critique of John Donne.
This section contains 10,271 words
(approx. 35 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Stanley Fish

SOURCE: Fish, Stanley. “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power.” In John Donne, edited by Andrew Mousley, pp. 157-81. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Fish argues that in his poetry Donne exercises the power of language to dominate and control.

‘my Feigned Page’

For a very long time I was unable to teach Donne's poetry. I never had anything good to say about the poems, and would always find myself rereading with approval C. S. Lewis's now fifty-year-old judgement on Donne as the ‘saddest’ and ‘most uncomfortable of our poets’ whose verse ‘exercises the same dreadful fascination that we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore—the hot eyed, unescapable kind’.1 Indeed my own response to the poetry was even more negative than Lewis's: I found it sick, and thought that I must be missing the point so readily seen by...

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This section contains 10,271 words
(approx. 35 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Stanley Fish
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Critical Essay by Stanley Fish from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.