Description
Book SynopsisMetaphysical Shadows: The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry examines the ways in which the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell continues to speak to working poets today. Modern Anglophone poets, from T. S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish in the 1920s and 1930s to Seamus Heaney, Maureen Boyle, Alfred Corn, Anne Cluysenaar, Kimberly Johnson, and Jericho Brown in the twenty-first century, have found in the work of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell a strikingly modern intellectualism, an emotional intensity, and a verbal richness that have inspired their own poems. Traces of this inspiration appear in echoes, allusions, direct responses, and similarities in approach and method as poets create new work in their own distinct voices. Such contemporary engagements furnish us with cues for how literary studies might approach the literature of the past without sacrificing it in the name of critique. They also demonstrate the continuing relevance of seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry in the twenty-first century. The poems of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell still have the power to cast shadows.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
A Note to the Reader
Metaphysical Shadows: An Introduction
Part I. Varieties of Shadows
Chapter One: Echo and Allusion: “The Extasie” Behind Seamus Heaney’s “Chanson d’Aventure”
Chapter Two: The Answer Poem: Anne Donne on the Isle of Wight
Chapter Three: Shared Subjects: Andrew Marvell, Archibald MacLeish, and Brendan Kennelly
Chapter Four: Modal Resemblances: “Metaphysical,” “Meditative,” and the Poetry of Donne, W. B. Yeats, and Ronald Johnson
Part II. Late 20th— and Early 21st—Century Shadows
Chapter Five: What Did Suffice: Scintillas of Vaughan in the Poetry of Anne Cluysenaar
Chapter Six: Donne, Heaney, and the Boldness of Love
Chapter Seven: The Depth of Herbert’s Voiceprint in the Poetry of Alfred Corn
Chapter Eight: Verbal Relish in the Poetry of Donne and Kimberly Johnson
Chapter Nine: The Tradition and the Individual Talent: Jericho Brown and the Donnean Note
Shadow Instruction: An Afterward
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
