Katherine Rundell: evaluation

Transcript context

…What is it that T.S. Eliot failed to understand about John Donne? Oh, that’s a really interesting question because, of course, usually T.S. Eliot is given the credit of rediscovering John Donne after the Victorian period in which his fashionability had really waned. I think he got a lot right about John Donne when he says he’s trying to picture in John Donne, somebody for whom every element of his life modifies his sensibility, that he is able to couple religion and body and the smell of a rose and the cooking of dinner into one great whole. That, I think, he got right. I think what he got wrong was he did not accentuate the strangeness of John Donne. I think he offered to us a John Donne who was trying to make things whole, but of course, John Donne’s poetry often carries with it a beautiful salute to human fracturing and human strangeness. He was writing at a time when people were offering a profoundly coherent vision of love: Walter Raleigh writing about Queen Elizabeth as the rose, or Philip Sidney constantly iterating this image of the woman as the white dove, that her shoulders are two white doves and her cheeks are two white doves. John Donne stood up in the center of that fashion and said, “No, you are stranger than that. You deserve poetry that is stranger than that. You deserve poetry that uses the images of fleas and sucking fish and suns rising and compasses to express the vertiginous and labyrinthine quality of human desire.” I don’t think that T.S. Eliot had a mindset at the time to recognize that. What do you think of the view that Donne is all about metaphysical beauty, and there’s an extreme shortage of physical beauty in his writings?…

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