John Donne: A Poet Out of His Time

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John Donne: A Poet Out of His Time

"The first poet in the world in some things," applauded Ben Jonson of his friend, John Donne (Donne, John Donne: A Selection of His Poetry 11). In the midst of the stylized and often frivolous verses of the Elizabethan and cavalier poets, John Donne's work emerges as startling, intellectual, and honest to human nature and emotion- classifying him as the first of the modern poets. Through an exploration of Donne's "The Sun Rising" and "The Flea", we shall reveal Donne's innovative style and technique, and how this repels him from the poetic orthodoxy of the seventeenth century and towards the style of the modern age.

0 "Busy old fool, unruly sun,/ Why dost thou thus?" Donne audaciously denounces the sun itself, a heavenly body worshipped through the ages, in his poem, "The Sun Rising". Moreover, Donne employs an interesting conceit: he uses the routine, everyday phenomena of the rising sun as the basis for a love poem, love being extraordinary, new, and often once-in-a-lifetime. Donne goes on dramatically and arrogantly to thre...

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