John Gives

John Gives (born in 1572 with London - died the March 31st 1631), Poète and preacher English of the reign of Jacques I {{er}}, regarded as the leader of the metaphysical Poésie, produced a varied work including/understanding of the Sonnet S, of the Poème S religious, the translations of the Latin , the epigram S, the reduced S, the Chanson S and the Sermon S.

Biography

John Donne was born in 1572 and was high within a family roman catholic. His/her father, a blacksmith prénommant itself John, died in 1576 by leaving behind him three children and his wife, Elizabeth. The latter was the girl of John Heywood, a close relative of Sir Thomas More. In 1593, Henry, the younger brother of John died of Fièvre in prison, where it had been locked up to have lodged a priest illegally. His/her uncle, a priest Jesuit, was torture victim and carried out: under the reign of Elisabeth {{Ière}}, the generalized persecution of the Catholics, as well physics as financial, was indeed currency.

Having the ambition to make career in the services of the State, it began studies of right to Thavies Inn in 1591 and followed studies to the Université of Oxford and the Université of Cambridge, without however being able to obtain a diploma because of its religious convictions.

In the Years 1590, front, or shortly after the death of his/her brother, John Donne was constrained to convert with the Anglicanisme.

It in addition on the occasion to travel on the continent and, in 1596 - 97, accompanied the count d' Essex in a forwarding with Cadiz and the the Azores.

In 1598, he became the secretary of the Minister of Justice Thomas Egerton ( Lord Ellesmere ). Although it was very estimated by its guard, this one the congédia in 1601, to have married in secrecy his/her niece, Ann More, marriage to which the family of the Lord was opposed.

Relieved, an imprisoned time, Donne divided then with its wife, who gave him twelve children, fourteen years difficult where works of circumstance followed one another in vain to gain the favor of influential characters.

Ordered priest in 1615, he became preacher with Lincoln' S Inn (1616 - 1621), station which he gave up after being appointed senior of the cathedral Saint-Paul (1621). Give receipt, thanks to its Sermons , of which 160 were collected, one fulgurating famous. In 1617, the death of his wife will increase her obsession of dead but also its religious enthusiasm. He died in February 1631 after having pronounced in front of Charles Ier his last preaching, “ the Duel of dead the ”.

Its work

John Donne was one of the most estimated preachers of his time, but it is also one of the largest nondramatic poets. It especially created poems of love and sonnets religious.

The major part of poetic work of Gives ( Satires , 1595 - 98 - the Litany , 1609 - Élégies, Chants and sonnets , 1611 - the Birthdays , 1611 - 12 - Night the , 1612 - Lamentations of Jérémie , 1631), caused at once the astonishment and the admiration of its readers by its formal innovations and sets of themes. Metaphysics par excellence, the poetry of Gives cultivates one of the fundamental processes of poetry baroque, the conceit (that one can translate by “metaphor” or “rhetorical figure”), whose systematic presence at the end of the poem destabilizes the reader and invites it to seize again the form of the poem of its truths eyes. The conceit - attested in England at the 14th century within the meaning of “design, concept, idea, thought”, then, starting from 1530, within the meaning of the Italian concetto , initially “concept” or “clever thought”, then “witty remark” and “rhetorical figure” - by bringing closer two orders to reality, matter and spirit, human and divine, visible and invisible, projects the spirit in a world of the immediacy, temporal and space, where the distance is abolished in the movement, and where eternity becomes concrete.

Samuel Johnson, in 1744, in The Lives off the Poets , gathered the Poètes metaphysics English such as George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Richard Crashaw or Henry Vaughan under the name of “ École of Gives ”, so much the personality, diversity and the width of the work of that which became senior of the Saint-Paul Cathedral dominated its time.

Running the counter to a tradition which had finished by éthérer the love, it crûment celebrates the carnal love by saying the things, but without never excluding spiritual dimension from the union of the lovers. Admired Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), for which it is that which could “braid in lakes of love of the iron pokers”, appreciated Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744), Donne was “redécouvert” at the 20th century, in particular by Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

The exemplarity of the poetic work of John Gives, in particular on the close connections between the monk and the layman, the body and the heart who live these complex and direct worms, of one fulgurating intelligence marked the Poète, Dramaturge, and critical modernistic Anglo-American Thomas Stearns Eliot (Nobel Prize of literature in 1948), which gave to the last style the poets English metaphysics of the 17th century. This one lives in this poetry érudite and brilliant one moment when the “dissociation of the sensitivity”, which was going to be the dividing line of modernity, had not taken place yet. “A thought, for Gives, was an experiment”, said T.S. Eliot.

One of the major texts of John Gives, “No man is year island, entire off itself…” perhaps inspired the title of the novel of Hemingway For which rings the knell :

No man is an island, a whole, complete in oneself; any man is a fragment of the continent, part of the unit; if the sea carries a lump of earth, Europe is reduced by it, as if the floods had carried a headland, the manor of your friends or the tien; the death of any man decreases me, because I belong to mankind; also never sends to ask for which rings the knell : it is for you that it sounds”. ( Devotions upon Emergent Occasions , 1624) It is one of the most famous texts of the English Littérature. To say that “no man is an island” could not make an apology for the Collectivisme, as of aucuns wanted to believe. It is an obvious observation. Any man is “part of the unit”, thanks to what we profit from the trade and the culture. “The death of any man decreases me, because I belong to mankind”: we learn the lesson from it that to attack others is to attack oneself, it is a moral rule without exception and to which we can subscribe without reserve, but without seeing that it forces to us to be with the service of others.

The work of John Donne is impregnated by his obsession of death, wished because it connects finally the Being to eternity, or dreaded because it precipitates it in nothing. Though it is not doubtful that the Christian Église does not condemn the Suicide, it was Christians who wanted to justify it. Of this number is Doctor Donne, theologist English who undertook to prove that the suicide is not defended in the Scriptures.

It is in these terms that the Encyclopédie of Diderot and of Alembert evokes, with the article “ suicide ”, the Biathanatos of John Donne. In this text which fascinated Thomas de Quincey and Borgès, Donne, calling upon the Bible, like a suicide the sacrifice of the Christ and esteem necessary interprets “to encourage the men with a right contempt of this life”.

Its Œuvres was joined together with London in 1839, 6 volumes in-8.

A conference on “ the metaphysical poetry of John Donne ” took place in January 2002 with the Université François Rabelais de Tours. The “ Acts of the Conference ”, organized by the Group of Anglo-American Research , under the direction of Claudine Raynaud were published.

Quotations

Stay, O sweet, and C not small channel!

Stay, O sweet, and C not small channel!

The light that shines comes from thine eyes;

The day station-wagons not: it is my heart,

Because that you and I must share.

Stay! however else my joys will die,

And perish in their infancy.

French translation by Gilles de Sèze:

Remainder, O my soft, does not rise!

Remainder, O my soft, does not rise!

the Light which shines comes from your eyes;

It is not the day which bores; it is my heart which is bored,

Because you and me must separate

Reste, or if not any joy at home will die

And perish in its infancy.

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