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John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy.(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Date: 20000101
Author:TREVOR, DOUGLAS

Donne is in a sense a psychologist.

-T. S. Eliot

Throughout his life, John Donne's prose and poetry are filled with references to, as well as accounts of, his self-understanding as a melancholic. [1] If we take his self-professed depressive tendencies as seriously as his devotional meditations, we find that the two are interlinked: Donne often describes ecstatic religious experience with the same metaphors of earthly instability and material metamorphoses he uses to catalogue his melancholic, self-destructive inclinations. Like Soren Kierkegaard, who will praise Christian ...

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