Donne, John | Douglas Trevor (essay date winter 2000)
Douglas Trevor (essay date winter 2000)
SOURCE: Trevor, Douglas. “John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy.” Studies in English Literature 40, no. 1 (winter 2000): 81-102.
[In the following essay, Trevor examines Donne's lifelong melancholy, or depression, as an integral part of his religious beliefs.]
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 Søren Kierkegaard, who will praise Christian belief in part...
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