Donne and W&B

I feel compelled to comment on W&B's take on the Donne poem in section 4. I am taking a course on English Lit during the renaissance and we worked with this exact poem a few weeks ago. The poem is titled, "A Valediction: Forbidding Morning" and was written in 1633. According to my professor, John Donne is considered a "founding father", if you will, of the mode of Metaphysical poetry in the English language. What that means is: it is going to be conversational, especially rhetorical, and will contain some witty device which is usually a long and complex metaphor. This poem certainly fits all of these qualifications. The poem is a speaker (may or may not be Donne) urging his lover not to be too upset that they must be apart for some time, and to substantiate that claim Donne uses a conceit which compares his love to heavenly, perfect things and the love of common people to earthly things that will pass away.

W&B show us a critic, and then go on to show why it is unsuccessful. Especially if one has read the entire work, it seems like it would be really hard to argue with W&B. The unknown critic theorizes that the earth moving is a comparison to the Copernican Theory, but this totally contradicts interrupts and contradicts the conceit that Donne uses throughout the rest of the poem.

This was kind of eye-opening for me. I definitely have seen historical background information used as a basis of criticism throughout my academic career. That is often the very first thing that I look at when looking at a work, and just from this example I wonder how many times I have done the same thing this critic did. Looking at the historical context of a text can blind us to what the poem actually says. I'm not ready to say that historical context shouldn't be used, because I don't think W&B say that either, but I definitely feel like it plays a far to big a role in how students and critics evaluate the meaning of a poem.