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TALKING TO A SILENT GOD: DONNE'S HOLY SONNETS AND THE VIA NEGATIVA.

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From: Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature
Date: 19990101
Author:Beaston, Lawrence

DONNE'S Holy Sonnets trouble many twentieth-century readers who, like Helen Gardner, find "some sickness in the soul" (xxxi) expressed in these poems--a certain note of despair out of keeping with the subject and the author's status. Most readers expect the poems of the Anglican priest, Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, to progress toward spiritual health, faith, and a comforting sense of God's abiding presence, even though they frequently begin with a speaker in some spiritual distress. But such an outcome is achieved in few, if any, of these poems. How, then, are we to ...

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