John Donne, Body and Soul

John Donne, one of the most brilliant poets and preachers of the English Renaissance, lived a life full of dramatic changes of fortune, and his writing reflects his wide range of experiences. His collected works vary from passionate love poems to devotional sonnets, from quiet meditations to caustic satires, and from decorous elegies to thundering sermons. For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne’s life into a complete image of the poet and priest that does not depend on a radical division between the two. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.
Reappraising Donne’s entire oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. Any experience, whether it be illness, sex, or reading a book, that ignored either its spiritual or physical component was for Donne inevitably incomplete or unsatisfying. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne’s obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.