Poetry

For the erotic poetry and elegies, consider pairing with Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). Like Donne in his erotic poems, Ovid uses extended metaphors and mythical allusions to openly discuss sex and seduction the Amores and Ars Amatoria. Twenty-first-century readers marvel at the strikingly modern turns of thought and phrase used by both Ovid and Donne. Another delightful pairing can be found in several of the song lyrics of Bob Dylan. References to the silent beloved and social iconoclasm inform all three writers. Also, readers notice similarities in the ironic, self-referential, naughty personae of all three writers. All three might be considered laureates of their time. Each had connections with or criticism of the central government: Ovid paid the price of political exile; Donne converted from Roman Catholicism to become Dean of the St. Paul’s Anglican Church; Dylan was one of the most revered countercultural voices of the second half of the 20th Century. 

For Donne’s devotional poetry, consider pairing with four twenty-first-century poets: Maurice Manning, Josh Bell, Matthea Harvey, and Melissa Range. Maurice Manning’s sequence of devotional poems, Bucolics, creates unexpected analogies out of Kentucky regional imagery and deploys colloquial diction, including continued addresses to God as “Boss.” Lines from Josh Bell’s devotional sequence, Zombie Sunday, juxtapose reverence and irreverence in the repeated address to “Gentle handed holy father, or whomever,” (1). Bell draws from horticulture for the technical specificity of the metaphysical conceit, and, like Donne, he brings the domain of the erotic into his religious verse. For examples of twenty-first-century devotional poetry specifically in the sonnet form, read Matthea Harvey’s Ceiling Unlimited. Like Donne, Harvey deploys the power of enjambment, unexpected objects, and paradox. In a set of Christ-centered sonnets, Melissa Range’s Horse and Rider, she combines Biblical allusion with graphic anatomical imagery and blood-rich motifs to reveal the continued effectiviness of the sonnet form today.