Donne, John - Michael Schoenfeldt (essay date fall 2001)

Michael Schoenfeldt (essay date fall 2001)

SOURCE: Schoenfeldt, Michael. “‘That spectacle of too much weight’: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 3 (fall 2001): 561-84.

[In the following essay, Schoenfeldt considers the theme of sacrifice as developed by post-Reformation religious poets, including Donne, suggesting that seventeenth-century writers imagined sacrifice as an interior experience rather than a physical event.]

But how then shall I imitate thee, and
Copie thy fair though bloudie hand?

—George Herbert

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

—Yogi Berra

This essay began with a question that has been rattling around in my head since I first began studying devotional poetry: Why did the scenario of the Christian sacrifice prove such a vexed and perplexing subject for lyric poetry in seventeenth-century...

[The entire page is 9744 words long]

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