Review of Elizabeth D. Harvey’s and Timothy M. Harrison’s “Embodied Resonances: Early Modern Science and Tropologies of Connection in Donne’s Anniversaries ”

摘要

John Donne's Anniversaries, written in 1611 and 1612, ostensibly aim to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of the poet's patron Sir Robert Drury. In doing so, they take in the whole earth, the sun and stars, music, theology and philosophy in comparisons so wide-ranging and hyperbolic that many, Ben Jonson included, deemed these poems both indecent and blasphemous. In "Embodied Resonances: Early Modern Science and Tropologies of Connection in Donne's Anniversaries", Elizabeth D. Harvey and Timothy M. Harrison trace a path through Donne's dense and sometimes obscure poetic imagery using the principle of 'resonance'. The Anniversaries, they argue, express Donne's epistemological anxieties about new philosophy which "calls all in doubt." However, through the use of 'resonance', the poems also evoke a sense of cosmic connectedness which links the poet, the reader, Elizabeth Drury's body, and the celestial firmament