Donne's Body

Abstract

Donne scholarship has often grappled with his urgent fixation on the body--his habit of expressing even abstract or spiritual ideas in physiological terms. In sermons, for instance, Donne speaks of the soul as having blood and bones, of the "bowells" of the spirit, and of sin as a whole organic bodily system. He also explicitly contends that soul and body are one, and that "all that the soule does, it does in, and with, and by the body." 1 Accounting for this striking materialism in a variety of ways, many critics nevertheless agree that Donne's preoccupation with the body is a form of self-absorption or "egotism." 2 They read his emphatic physicality as a powerful assertion of self, motivated by a great desire for control. John Carey, for instance, sees the aim of Donne's physical imagery as a self-assertive "intensity"--an effort to make "his inner self . . . sound concentrated and vehement." 3 Similarly, Elaine Scarry argues that Donne is after the materiality of language ("its capacity to mime, and perhaps eventually acquire, the actual weight of what it describes"), because he wants to carry "language into the body" and thereby make that body "volitional" and "noncontingent." 4 Again, the idea is that Donne's focus on the body is all about self-will, power, autonomy. 5

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