The Body is His Book: John Donne’s Sacramental Poetics

Abstract

This thesis explores the spiritual arc of John Donne’s early lyric poetry through the lens of the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on the work of Max Weber, I situate Donne in a post-Reformed cultural environment with which his strenuous Catholic upbringing clashes, creating a rupture in consciousness from which a distinctive, though often paradoxical religious persona emerges. The decline of a particularly tactile sense of Catholic sacramentalism and the rise of a more transcendental Protestant mode of scriptural intercourse causes Donne to attempt a poetic synthesis of body and soul in order to reconcile the extremes of his own divided religious loyalties. Following a developmental trajectory from Donne’s earliest Elegies and Satires through the Songs and Sonnets and ending with a treatment of the Holy Sonnets, it will be shown that Donne forged a poetic via media between his own Catholic past and the growing Anglican consensus in early modern England.