Essays and articles on John Donne

More than any other poet of the period, Donne represents his inner search for religious and erotic authenticity in such essentially continuous terms that even New Historicists find themselves forced to admit that the "sexual adverturism of [his] cynical young manhood" and "his adult religiosity" represent cognate "forms of passion radiat[ing] from Donne's frantic quest for personal immortality." (10) Quoting Kathryn R. Kremen, Robert N. Watson argues that the failure of this quest for transcendence leads not just to the misogynistic scapegoating or seduction of the women in the libertine lyrics, but also to the devout love lyrics' fantasy of making the "'sexual union of man and woman on earth ... the temporal and secular image which prefigures ... the hypostatical union in body and soul of man and the Godhead in heaven.'" (11)