Lawrence Beaston (essay date winter 1999)
SOURCE: Beaston, Lawrence. “Talking to a Silent God: Donne's Holy Sonnets and the Via Negativa.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 60, no. 2 (winter 1999): 95-109.
[In the following essay, Beaston examines the tension between modern readers' expectations and Donne's intent in the Holy Sonnets, arguing that the Sonnets dramatize the medieval concept of via negativa, or the experience of God's presence and mystery even in His apparent absence.]
Donne's Holy...
Source: Poetry Criticism, ©2003 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 6938 words.)
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