1. Baker-Smith, Dominic. "John Donne's Critique of True Religion." John Donne: Essays in Celebration. London: Methuen & Co., 1972. Ed. A. J. Smith. Pages 404-432.
2. Baumlin, James S. "Donne's Christian Diatribes: Persius and the Rhetorical Persona of 'Satyre III' and 'Satyre V'." The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne. Ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Pages 92-105.
3. Brown, Meg Lota. "Interpretive Authority in Donne's Biathanatos." Praise Disjoined: Changing Patterns of Salvation in 17th-Century English Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Ed. William P. Shaw. Pages 151-163.
4. Low, Anthony. "Donne and the Reinvention of Love." English Literary Renaissance 20:3. Autumn 1990. Pages 465-486.
5. Miller, Clarence H. "Donne's 'A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day' and the Nocturns of Matins." Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne's Poetry. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1975. Pages 305-310.
6. Rajan, Tilottama. "'Nothing sooner broke': Donne's Songs and Sonets as Self-Consuming Artifact." New Casebooks: John Donne. Ed. Andrew Mousley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pages 45-62.
7. Shami, Jeanne. "Donne's Sermons and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation." John Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross. Ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain, Frances M. Malpezzi. Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995. Pages 380-412.
8. Shuger, Debora Kuller. "Absolutist theology: The Sermons of John Donne." Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Reprinted from the 1990 Unifersity of California Press edition. Pages 159-217.
9. Zickler, Elaine Perez. "'nor in nothing, nor in things': The Case of Love and Desire in Donne's Songs and Sonets." John Donne Journal 12:1-2 (1993). Pages 17-39.

Baumlin, James S. "Donne's Christian Diatribes: Persius and the Rhetorical Persona of 'Satyre III' and 'Satyre V'." The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne. Ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Pages 92-105.

Baumlin quickly argues that "Satyre III" and "Satyre V" are primarily persuasive rather than meditative. Regarding imitation or appropriation of classical models, Baumlin focuses on the figure of Persius.² The Renaissance (to generalize) saw Persian stoicism as uniquely suited to Christian themes. Rather than Juvenal or Horace, Donne's "Satyre III" is most like Persius's popular third satire, which focuses on stern religious commitment to a "steep path" - and is characterized by "paradox, hyperbole, ... forms of 'violent' metaphor; ... impassioned, second-person address; ... and, above all, monologistic dialogue, with its abrupt transitions in both speaker and argument" (95) - all also characteristic of Donne's third satire. Baumlin reads Donne's "Satyre III" as a persuasion towards personal quest for religious truth, questioning inherited wisdom. Baumlin points out through example the poem's "chiding" and "vehement" questioning of the reader. He focuses on line 43: "Seeke true religion. O where?" Donne's monologistic dialogue allows him to present and critique various opposing religious stances (98). Baumlin writes: "while it evokes the Persian style in its concision, it generally avoids its model's penchant for obscurity" (99). While Donne uses Persian "seriousness, and persuasive vigor" as well as Persian symbolism, turning Persius's "steep path" into a "huge hill, Cragged, and steep" (lines 79-80). Donne shifts from "exhortation to ... militant [call] ... to scrutinize ... temporal authority," particularly the Anglican Church (99). Donne's speaker concludes, according to Baumlin, by becoming didactic.
By contrast, Donne's first, second, and fourth satires offer "at best, indirect methods of achieving social change" (99). Baumlin tracks the evolution of Donne's satiric voice through the satires, arguing that it undermines itself in these other satires. What Baumlin does not make explicit, though clearly implies, is a kind of self-defeating satire of satire. Baumlin finds that "Satyre V" (addressed to Egerton, Donne's patron) reflects Persius's fifth satire - though not as much as Donne's own "Satyre III." Seriousness and indignation, absent in the fourth satire, now returns. Baumlin makes such great points as this: "Certainly the satirist's view of the interrelatedness of all men - that 'all things be in all' (9) - is an attitude that derives from his charity and general concern for the whole of mankind" (101). But the point is the poem's militaristic advocating of this concern. Though the fifth satire lacks the "power or emotive force" (102) of "Satyre III," Baumlin argues that it still "shares the same purpose of engaging the ... . Audience personally ... to initiate legal reform" (102). Baumlin concludes that "Satyre V" blends "thoroughly and inseparably" "the Persian mask ... with Donne's own 'public' voice" (102). Baumlin attacks those who would dismiss the satire as "wit" and not "serious." Baumlin connects Donne's "strong lines" and "metaphysical" style - as well as his conciseness and complexity of thought, plus his direct addressing of his audience for the purpose of persuasion - "to his early apprenticeship under Persius" (104). At Baumlin's most extreme, he claims that Donne's style is an English version of Persius's.

Rajan, Tilottama. "'Nothing sooner broke': Donne's Songs and Sonets as Self-Consuming Artifact." New Casebooks: John Donne. Ed. Andrew Mousley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pages 45-62.

Rajan offers a poststructuralist interpretation of Donne's Songs and Sonets, focusing on language and its "contradictions." He argues that this is not anachronistic, pointing out that Renaissance sonnet sequences (including Shakespeare's) are often about act of writing, working as a group to tell a story of their composition.
Rajan's interpretation of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" provides an example. He argues that the poem's circular form reinforces its "central image" of the circle - thus unifying form and content (46). After pointing out the poem's fairly obvious ambiguities, he argues that the very metaphysical conceit of disparate metaphors makes the poetic artifice clearer - or, to use Rajan's jargon - "the assertions of art remain within the prison-house of language" (47). Rajan makes his point well in one particularly readable passage on "The Sunne Rising" and its final (at the end of the poem and, as we may be inclined, at the end of a "mutual love"-affirming sonnet sequence) transformation of the lovers into the literal center of the universe, referring to the

belief that the alchemy of language can actually transform the world of fact represented by the motions of the sun, and create through rhetoric what cannot be affirmed through logic. That the extravagant hyperbole of the poem asks to be resisted is fairly obvious. It is by means of an optical illusion that the lover eliminates the (I.13), and the poem is aware of itself as a sleight of hand (48).

How empty a thing is Rhetorique? (and yet Rhetorique will make absent and remote things present to your understanding). How weak a thing is Poetry? (and yet Poetry is a counterfait Creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were). [Italics, emphasizing Derrida's theory, mine]

Low, Anthony. "Donne and the Reinvention of Love." English Literary Renaissance 20:3. Autumn 1990. Pages 465-486.

Low claims that the English Renaissance transformed the love lyric from "feudal" or "mistress-servant" (465) model to one that privatized the couple, appropriate given rising mercantilism - but he unsettles this, readily admitting that each poem is a special case requiring historical attention. Low argues that Donne's poems, meant to be shared like those of others, are due credit for being so different despite a similar context that expected poetic attention to social rank.
Beginning with the satires, Low finds that "Satire I" is about "the importance and difficulty of what we now call male bonding, or the building up of a support system among young male equals" (467). Women are not only "impediments" but primarily potential sources of revenue, either through marriage to an heir or friendship to someone who gains the same (468). We may remember, though Low does not bring it up until later (472), Donne's marriage to Ann More, among other biographical details, and this leads us to perceiving in Low a kind of tempered version of Carey's cynicism. Similarly, Low finds "Satire II" about "ways of advancing," including poetry (468). Donne here specifically disdains poetic imitation, signaling a shift from classical and medieval concerns, and "the clear implication" for Low is that "the religious and cultural architecture within which love poetry once subsisted, has been ruthlessly dismantled ... leaving Donne ... to inhabit the bare ruins" (470). The poetic seducer is a lying lawyer in "Satire II," and love is subordinated to historical concerns as "feudalism gives place to a ... market economy" (470).
Of the elegies, Low writes of "love, if that is the right term for the mostly cynical relationships he portrays" (and condemn) that share in machiavellian social scheming of the time (470). He acknowledges "exceptions," but states that they "may add grace notes and counterpoint" but do not "dispel" (471). Low relates this to a crisis of jobs and a shortage of heiresses in the 1590s. Though Low mentions Ann More quite soon after, he does not draw the obvious conclusion, which might appear both overly cynical and at odds with his loose New Historicism.
Presumably after his marriage, Donne shifts towards private love. Low offers an analysis of "The Sunne Rising" that supports this view. Perhaps his best point along these lines is obvious: that "The Canonization" has private lovers literally supplanting kings and saints. Donne converts the problem to social dishonesty to the problem of private dishonesty, but this simplification of scope does not remove the problem (479). Whereas Low wrote early in the article of the careful separation of speaker and Donne, as well as of historicism, he indulges himself to illuminate Donne's "psychosocial suffering," particularly his apostasy, as well as his times'. What we are left with is a feeling of "personal will" defined by love, rather than Descartes's thought (482).
Regarding the "problem" of Donne's depiction of love as alternately physical and spiritual, Low ably finds less neoPlatonism than a deferment of spiritual concerns (483), comparing Donne to Spencer's neoPlatonism for example, a tendency Augustinian and deeply medieval (though Low does not say this). If this is new, it is so only in its expression. Low ultimately retreats (485) through this reading to the chronology of "immature" and "mature" poems. But Low returns to his argument, stating that this too is personal and removes love from the authority figures to which it was previously tied (484, 486).
This is a measured essay, taking pains to point out how it relates to various critical paradigms, particularly New Criticism and New Historicism. Nonetheless, his points are not always clear: the Renaissance "market economy" may have commodified love in life (470) but not in verse, and the medieval tradition of writing to one's patron / mistress seems the thesis of commodification. He retreats into historical determinism in claiming Descartes is applicable to Donne through the cultural milieu of ideas (482), slipping from close reading to loose rhetoric. Ultimately, his ideas are stronger than the critical tendencies with which he attempts to align and categorize himself.

Miller, Clarence H. "Donne's 'A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day' and the Nocturns of Matins." Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne's Poetry. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1975. Pages 305-310.

"A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day" offers a very different combination of sacred and profane love: the speaker's beloved in the poem is dead, and enacts through "the skewed violence" (305) of the poem his attempt to work through despair and anticipate heavenly reunion. Many critics have read only the despair. Richard Sleight, however, argued that the poem uses "destruction [as] a mode of creation," undoing that dichotomy. Miller focuses upon the ecclesiastical meaning of "nocturnal" and the phrase "this houre her Vigill," suggestion the monastic hours, prayers recited at a number of specific times during the day and night. The "'hour' of matins consisted of three nocturnes, originally recited at (or near) midnight," Miller tells us.
Miller defends his focus by pointing out that Donne knew of such things and used liturgy in other poems. St. Lucy's feast was on December 13 and commemorates the Virgin; references and occurrences to and of five in "A Nocturnall" are interpreted as references to a number tied to Mary and thus the Ideal Woman in general. Matins, more specifically, was divided into three nocturnes, each containing nine parts of three kinds; the "Nocturnall" has a nine-line stanza. Matins was traditionally interpreted as moving from worldly concerns to renewal through grace. The three central stanzas of Donne's "Nocturnall" move from dark despair to dark resignment. Whereas Donne repeats (with variation) the first line as the last, unique among his work, the nocturnes of matins (though also lauds and vespers) were characterized by repetition before and after each of the nine psalms.
St. Lucy's story is itself reflected in the poem only through the contrasting of "the lustful lovers and the sainted lady" (309) in the poem's last stanza. Genesis was one of the few Biblical lessons to remain in the cycle of hours as it was recast towards saints rather than a year-long summary and commentary on scripture; Miller finds that Donne reverses Genesis in lines 22-29 of his "Nocturnall," sweeping away the Flood and describing cosmic chaos prior to Creation. Miller, in his conclusion, states that "the quintal, trinal, and antiphon phonal form of these nocturnes [of matins in the dine office] provided an allegorical pattern ... of recreation and regeneration which Donne adapted" (310). "The 'Nocturnall' provides evidence that Donne might well have shared the opinion of a modern writer ... when he says of the Night-Office that 'its chief grace is that it stimulates the mind to serious reflection' (310).
The argument is strained, but some relationship is clearly there.

Zickler, Elaine Perez. "'nor in nothing, nor in things': The Case of Love and Desire in Donne's Songs and Sonets." John Donne Journal 12:1-2 (1993). Pages 17-39.

This is an incredibly confused essay. A single example should suffice, though I shall provide more. After a paragraph worth of discussion of how various kinds of love for Leone Ebreo (the 16th-Century neo-Platonist) result in various patterns, such as "undulating sine waves," "straight radiant lines," and "asymptotes or ellipses," Zickler writes: "I, and not Ebreo, have charted these graphs, but what is important is" - followed by a line and a half that summarize, though still with some opaqueness, the point of the preceding paragraph (18-19). Later, after mentioning the connection between love and knowledge, Zickler abruptly returns to Ebreo, questioning whether his work is truly about divine love at all (as if this were already in doubt) - a questioning immediately followed by quotes illustrating his archly Petrarchan ideas.
Zickler concerns herself - overmuch, it seems, in form rather than subject - with Donne's casuistical subjectivity, which she opposes to modern "psychoanalytic subjectivity," arguing that it informs all of his work and "mark[s] the emergence of an incipiently modern literary subjectivity" (17). Arguing for an "organic" link between 17th-Century literature and "casuistic practice - meditational poetry, for example --," Zickler claims "that the importance of casuistic discourse to Donne's writing inheres in his radical structuring of dialogue, and in an epistemology embodied in the psychoanalytic notion of transference" (17). Such opaque - not to mention unintentionally self-ironic - writing apparently makes her feel less intellectually insecure.
Zickler argues that Donne uses dialogue and rhetorical conflict for the sake of learning, never "yielding to nor rejecting" the beloved, neither Petrarchan nor libertine, and always in the future - i.e., in process (18). She writes: "Like the problem of suicide ... in Biathanatos, the problem of love and desire involves charting a path through the twin tyrannies of mastery and submission" (18). Relating lines from Donne's sermons (I:236-237⁶), Zickler has Donne arguing that God turns traits, even those bad ones such as covetousness (which He also gave us), to His own ends (19) - her point is neo-Platonic, but she obscures and avoids the obvious implications on Donne's combinations of the erotic and religious, of his godly lust and lust for God. Zickler gets around, on the bottom of 21, to addressing the long-standing connection between eros and thanatos, but retreats into concluding that this illustrates "ambivalence" and that "self-murder" is implied by conception and cellular division (i.e. self-multiplication) (21-22). Having linked Donne not only with neo-Platonists but with Socrates himself, Zickler connects the desire to avoid death with Sapho before moving on - and showing that Donne also connects love with knowledge. Ziegler next suggests that Donne, like neo-Platonists, advocated "conversion" and not "possession" of one with his lover, so that "sexual difference" is "erased" - a strange assertion for anyone who has read the bulk of Donne's sonnets, though she predictably focuses on "Epithalamion" as if it is at all representative. She then connects this with Freudian psychology and the child's experience of perceiving self; though right, this adds nothing but scattered intellectual context to her argument, if one can call her patchwork essay that, about Donne.
Having repeatedly connected Donne with neo-Platonists, as if Donne's self-configurations throughout his works were consistent and never strained (as when one sophistically argues as a preacher that the most libidinous of desires - and, by implication, poems - are neo-Platonic and holy despite all evidence to the contrary, as if a desire for sacrilege itself comes from God and leads to holy awareness), Zickler begins suddenly to talk of post-modern contrasts and mutual co-dependencies, arguing that "Donne focuses on the tradition of the Platonic and neo-Platonic ... in a ... very modern way, emphasizing the transferential qualities of love" - a very strange sort of neo-Platonism indeed. After some comparison of Donne to Freud, Zicker attempts to illustrate this neo-Platonic co-dependency by proclaiming the conclusion of "Going to Bed" to be truly educational (26), leading to a discussion and quoting of Freud's comparison of his analysis of sexual desire to the gynecologist's objectivity. "This is all well and good," Zickler tell us, though this may apply to Freud and not her. After repeating her summary of Freud, she claims that Freud too was interested in "neither innocence nor penance" - a somewhat strained reading. This connects to Donne only in its focus on transitive relationships, a signifier for nothing more than Derridan play. The irony of following a comparison of Donne to Freud with the phrase "Donne, like [the neo-Platonist] Ebreo" - much less the astounding continuation of that phrase, "also charts the problematic relationship of love and desire" (28) - seems lost on Zickler, yet this is like comparing gender feminism with Catholicism on the grounds that both chart the problematic relationship between repression and society.
Zickler attempts to support this with a reading of "Love's Alchymie" that strains to force the poem's hedonistic lines into accord with Donne's neo-Platonic sermons (28-29). At least Zickler avoids a simple reading of the poem's speaker as misogynistic. Zickler claims that "the idealized woman" is nothing more than a "Mummy, possest" - in life and the poem - but does not seem to understand that this directly undermines, if not attacks, the Petrarchan and neo-Platonic values she elsewhere ascribes to Donne. Zickler then quotes a Donne sermon (29-30) that argues knowledge is dead and static, directly undermining her argument that learning is the end of Donne's focus on love as a transitive.
Not smart enough to avoid altogether reductionistic gendered readings, Zickler then criticizes the "idolatry of the phallus" in "Farewell to Love," arguing against "the logic of the phallus" and stating: "for me, obviously, these qualities recommend Donne as a poet for women, not just a male coterie" (31). Zickler rattles off the assumption that "the idealization of woman is also ... the degradation of woman" - an equation sophistically applied to women and not to kings, for example. Zickler inevitably turns to the "misogyny" of men comparing lovers. Zickler then takes great pains, referring to Donne's sermons, to show that "Aire and Angels" is not misogynistic (32-34). Yet her conclusion defends gender differences even as she elsewhere attacks it (conventional in gendered academic discourse), claiming (or remembering) that disparity allows for the transitive, ever-unfinished dialogue she attributes with a broad brush to Donne, Freud, and neo-Platonism.
Zickler seems unable to tell the difference. If she concluded by claiming that she was illustrating the same transitive nature she ascribes to Donne, that she was opening dialogue and never finishing it in the same way, we might at least admire her for cleverness. For Zickler, praise is insult, hedonism is neo-Platonism, Freud is Ebreo, and Donne is something different altogether depending on the paragraph in question - assuming he even appears in a chosen paragraph, altogether not very likely. Zickler stereotypically seems to want to advocate a process of sharing and learning over either phallic conquest or soulful unity, but she produces a work that is nothing if not a call for her own psychoanalysis. At least the extreme post-modernists are honest about the fact that they're saying contradictory nothings.
Once again (not to call out for my own psychoanalysis, though I dispel such a possibility by sanely pointing out that irony as well as this one), the poems seem far, far less vexing than their critics.

Brown, Meg Lota. "Interpretive Authority in Donne's Biathanatos." Praise Disjoined: Changing Patterns of Salvation in 17th-Century English Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Ed. William P. Shaw. Pages 151-163.

Biathanatos is, as Brown demonstrates, a critical minefield.

George Williamson maintains that the treatise is Donne's "most complete philolsophical statement,"⁷ while Evelyn Simpson dismisses it ... . Joan Webber claims ... [it] demonstrates the inadequacy of formal logic and ... reason, whereas Terry Sherwood argues it is a Thomistic defense of reason ... . Its ... "... assertion of individual autonomy" [is central] ... according to John Carey; conversely, Robert Ornstein writes that [its] ... arguments extend from traditional ... theories. William Clebsch discusses the work as a serious casuistical treatise, and Camille Slights says it is a failed satire on the methods of casuistry (153-4).⁸

Baker-Smith, Dominic. "John Donne's Critique of True Religion." John Donne: Essays in Celebration. London: Methuen & Co., 1972. Ed. A. J. Smith. Pages 404-432.

Baker-Smith begins by recounting T. S. Eliot's characterization of Donne as modern and self-obsessed rather than pious, a view both challenged and confirmed by this essay. After giving a very brief summary of Donne's religiosity prior to Satyre III, Baker-Smith then offers a brief and rudimentary analysis of that poem (405). Baker-Smith offers a biographical reading, concluding that "when Donne ceased to be a Papist and became an Anglican it is unlikely that he thought of it as a 'conversion': it was simply a purer realisation of his Christian conviction" (407) - a seductive argument, though based more on a loose biographical interpretation of Satyre III, with its rhetorical pretense to objective inquiry, combined with wishful thinking, than the evidence (which Carey reasonably interprets quite differently): a person may well see one sect as "a purer realisation of ... Christian conviction" than another, but one is well aware of converting, of crossing a line of apostasy, especially as a Catholic in seventeenth-century England. Baker-Smith sees Donne as a humanist and a doubting but serious sceptic.
Turning to the sermons, Baker-Smith focuses on Donne's criticism of salvation through work, made while advocating good works - though not for their own sake. After dealing with more theology, Baker-Smith remarks: "All this may seem far removed from the injunction to 'stand inquiring right' but the common bond is an appreciation of the personal response' (413). Turning back to "stand[ing] inquiring right," Baker-Smith claims that Donne argues for "authentic experience" (as opposed to what?), an "approach that sifts the evidence with sensitive discrimination and fully accepts the reading that emerges unscathed" (414). Baker-Smith then has Donne advocating the Bible as sole source of revelation (415). In contrast to Baker-Smith's biographical (or "literal") interpretation of Satyre III, he pays attention to the rhetorical situation of the more pessimistic Anniversaries (though the reverse would be more reasonable if one takes the Satyres as satires), generally dismissing them - although he finds their focus on memory to again be "self"-centered: "Only by reduction to the self, to the ground of consciousness, can the believer like the Cartesian philosopher discern reality; and at the center of the self is memory" (417). This is either rudimentary or equivocation.
Turning again to theology, Baker-Smith claims that the Church, for Donne, offers "contact with God, but the final step ... remains the responsibility of the individual" (418). The Church rings God on the phone; we have to answer. But, if one is looking for individualism, non-Anglican Protestants have gone further than this. Pseudo-Martyr, unlike the satire of Satyre III, receives attention to rhetorical situation as did The Anniversaries. Baker-Smith then digresses into an analysis of Donne's religious context ("Sarpi presents the Council of Trent as a collision of human frictions" [426]), at best a study of Donne's sources and at worst having little to do with Donne or the essay's title. When Baker-Smith at last returns to Donne, he subsumes all anti-Catholic sentiment into promotion of the individual (429) - rather than, say, Anglican propaganda. Baker-Smith concludes by claiming that Donne's "emphasis on personal response" and "awareness of subjectivity" while advocating "constant self-discipline" is both "the expression of a new mode of religious sensibility" and one "rooted in tradition" - both half-modern and half-medieval (432).
Baker-Smith requires a good deal of simplification to make "Donne's writings ... demonstrate a clear unity" (431). Baker-Smith's conclusions are minor; his strength is in more specific theological issues, generally only mentioned and quickly abandoned. We are inclined to agree with his conclusions, in as much as he simply points out Donne's obvious focus on the individual and his role as transitional figure, while disparaging his methods, which subordinate all of Donne's writings to specific situations, obscuring the conflicts between them in broad strokes in order to make them ironic and occasional - while Satyre III is treated as anything but the same. Baker-Smith would have done better to show a self-conscious irony here, focusing on his own subjectivity.

Shuger, Debora Kuller. "Absolutist theology: The Sermons of John Donne." Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Reprinted from the 1990 Unifersity of California Press edition. Pages 159-217.

Shuger's argument might best be summed up as such: God's hand, for Donne, is both "oppressing" and good (quoted on 195). Centrally dealing with power (161), Shuger uses the term "theological absolutism" (and its variants), by which she at first means a politicization of the sacred (but at other times seems to mean the less specific blending of, or analogical rhetoric between, the two). Because Shuger can be somewhat obtuse, I'll let her summarize her argument: "Donne consistently and insistently deploys language associated with absolute monarchy in his treatment of the divine, and he stresses precisely that aspect of absolutism most alien to the modern mentality: the configuration of ideal relations in terms of domination and submission" (164) - which she finds everywhere in Donne.⁹ This necessitates our own negotiation with the pejorative that has attached to domination, oppression, obedience, and even guilt or fear. Shuger makes many contextual and comparative points that do not merit summary here, but her main points run as follows.

• GOD: Donne's God is potentia absoluta, the all-powerful "Majesty" who requires our "feare" and "unquestioning obedience," who "'may damn without respect of sin, if he will"' (168-9, quoting Donne's sermons) and whose decisions are fair but without appeal.¹⁰ The absolutism of monarchy so rejected in the English king is celebrated in God.
• CHRIST: While God is good and Christ a sacrifice, that sacrifice renders man a servant, "placing him under heavier obligations" (187).
• SATAN: Shuger writes: "The devil occupies a surprisingly small place in Donne's theology because the self replaces Satan as the origin of evil" (183).
• "MAN": Donne's man, by contrast, must obey, to the denial of all else; all must be done solely to glorify God.¹¹ Donne's focus on dominant-submissive, even master-servant, relations is present both in his writing on God and marriage, with woman "'content ... in silence will all subjection'" (quoted on 185); thus the self is "female" to God (193).
• GUILT: To Shuger's Donne, guilt is not only to be valorized but "almost an intrinsically desirable condition" to God (180).¹²
• THE ELECT: The elect perceive God's punishments and gifts pushing them towards Him, pain as pleasure; Donne calls us to holy masochism (197-8).
• DONNE'S SELF-SERVING MOTIVE: Shuger finds that Donne's emphasis on unresolved scriptural ambiguity leaves the priest with the power of interpretation, a power he stresses over and over in his sermons (208); "thus," she writes, "despite Donne's deep desire to submit to God, he also has no small interest in associating himself with divine authority" (207).¹³

Shami, Jeanne. "Donne's Sermons and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation." John Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross. Ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain, Frances M. Malpezzi. Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995. Pages 380-412.

Emphasizing historical context and grouping Donne with moderates seeking to change the system from within, Shami centrally seeks to undermine readings of Donne's sermons as absolutist and / or simply propagandistic for the crown and the Church of England. Shami ably writes of the sermons as marginalized and uncontextualized: "critics who profoundly mistrust the literal in poetry ... find nothing anomalous in reading the sermons literally" (382), treat them as a unified whole, "refer[ring] to 'the sermons' as if 1625 [James I's death and Charles I's succession] had never occurred" (382), and quote them selectively, usually as authorities on Donne's "mature" thought to support various arguments on his poetry, despite their apparent internal contradictions. "I" in the sermons may be hypothetical, not biographical, a rhetorical trick to pull in an audience (385). Disputing Carey, Shami points out that, far from actually reading the sermons, the index has 204 references to God's mercy and only 41 to His power. For Shami, "context is all" (383); not only does Shami attack Marotti (388-9) on this ground, but Shuger:

the reference [Shuger cites] ... qualifies, if it does not negate, the absolutist meaning Shuger intends and epitomies the misinterpretability of isolated quotations from the sermons. Donne continues the analogy [quoted by Shuger] in parentheses: 'Measure God by earthly Princes; (for we may measure the world by a Barly corne)' (5:371), nullifying Shuger's claim about the extraordinary degree to which Donne stresses the analogy between God and Kings ... (389).

NOTES
¹ These reviews were written for Clinton A. Brand's class taught at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in Spring 2001. [BACK]
² A bit of Persian background need be included here. A Roman poet of the full name Aulus Persius Flaccus, he lived from 34-62. Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia colorfully but instructively notes that he "wrote fastidiously and sparingly, leaving at his death six brief but noted satires. These have been called sermons on Stoic texts, because they sternly censure contemporary immorality and contrast the Rome of his day with the older, Stoic ideal of virtue. They deal with the importance of earnest behavior, the nature of true religion, the correct use of wealth, and the nature of freedom. The poem on false taste in poetry is considered his best. Although he imitates and quotes the satires of the Roman poet Horace, he lacks Horace's genial, worldly humor." [BACK]
³ Rajan's text is cited as: "John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley, CA, 1953-62), 4:87." [BACK]
⁴ "An anti-sequence": sort of how Nietzsche (or Sterne, perhaps?) would have written a sonnet sequence. [BACK]
⁵ Rajan at his worst is full of postmodern certainty (oxymoronic in theory but not in practice): "The poems no longer address [anyone known] ... . Hence they renounce all pretence at a logocentric hermeneutics" (55). His claim of Donne's deliberate disordering of his sonnets seems to overreach. At his best, however, Rajan does make a connection between his interpretations and Donne's work - as the Donne quotation I've reproduced here, though not from the "anti-sequence," suggests. [BACK]
⁶ Zickler cites: The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkely: University of California Press, 1953; reissued 1984)." [BACK]
⁷ Brown cites Williamson's "The Libertine Donne" from Philological Quarterly XII, No. 3 (1934), p. 277. [BACK]
⁸ See Brown for complete citations. [BACK]
⁹ The quote continues: "Yet [this] ... is ... in many ways representative of the mainstream of English Reformation theology" (164). Shuger further stresses this heterodoxy: "Donne's religious writings differ from those of his contemporaries primarily in the degree to which he stresses the analogy between God and kings" (165). [BACK]
¹⁰ As Shuger writes, "Donne's monotheism includes two related elements: the unlimited power of God and the representation of such power as terrifying and destructive" (170-1) - not only "'his power hath no limitation'" but He "'shall grinde them [sinners] to powder'" (171, quoting Donne's sermons) and causes unwarranted suffering as well as more commonly causing suffering as punishment (173). This, Shuger suggests, is the result of Donne's attention to doctrinal "illogic" (174): the unjust nature of punishing Adam's descendants and those who live and die never hearing of Christ (174-5). [BACK]
¹¹ "Human action," writes Shuger, "is viewed in black-and-white terms, and the 'white' portion squeezed by a spiritual rigorism into nonexistence" (179). [BACK]
¹² Donne wrote: "the more I vilifie my selfe, the more I glorifie God" (quoted on 182). As Shuger writes, "one must be and cannot be perfect," and guilt is the recognition of this tension (188) and, ultimately, of God (190). [BACK]
¹³ As Shuger herself notes, this point fits well with Carey's psychobiography of Donne as primarily ambitious. [BACK]
¹⁴ For example: "Domination and punishment in theology are like objects approaching the speed of light; they lose their ordinary nature, and suddenly the relations of time and space, of power and pain, become paradoxical and unfamiliar" (199). Pages 193-194 are worth investigating for their masterful description of Donne's sexualization of his own yearning for God and Christ, placed by Shuger within the context of power relations and the self's femaleness. [BACK]