Stanley Fish opens his essay on Donne with a confession. For years he could not teach the poems. He had nothing good to say about them. He kept returning with approval to C. S. Lewis, who had written half a century earlier that Donne is the saddest and most uncomfortable of English poets, and that his verse exerts the fascination we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore, the hot-eyed, unescapable kind. Fish went further than Lewis. He found the poetry sick. He assumed he must be missing whatever everybody else could see.
Then he stopped assuming that. He built the essay out of the aversion because he found a poet who uses language to dominate, poems that exercise verbal power and then report the exercise, so that any question about a local choice receives one answer, that the choice secures further control. That essay has organized Donne criticism for a generation. Defenders of Donne now defend him against Fish.
Read the confession again. Fascination. Inescapability. A voice that will not release you. Fish and Lewis are two hostile witnesses testifying to a grip, and the grip is what the lovers report. Ask a man who reads Donne for pleasure what the pleasure consists of and he will tell you about the sentence that refuses to let him breathe until the last word, the argument that arrives before his objection can form, the feeling of being taken over. He says it fondly. Fish says it and files a complaint. The two camps agree about the sensation and split on the verdict. What divides them is a prior disposition toward being overpowered by words.
John Stuart Mill laid down a rule in 1833. Eloquence is heard. Poetry is overheard. The poet writes as though no one listens. Donne breaks the rule in his first line, every time.
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love. Mark but this flea, and mark in this. Busy old fool, unruly sun. Batter my heart, three-person'd God. Death, be not proud. Go, and catch a falling star.
Someone gets addressed. A woman, God, the sun, Death, a friend who has said something stupid. In none of these is it you. The second-person slot arrives already occupied, and you find yourself standing in the doorway of a room where a man is working on somebody else.
Arthur Marotti supplies the historical fact underneath. Donne wrote for named readers. Friends, patrons, men from the Inns of Court, the woman he married in secret and ruined his career over. The poems went out in manuscript to people who knew who the you was, and they came to us four hundred years late, out of the private circuit and into print. We read another man's correspondence while the ink is still wet. Part of the intoxication is the intoxication of access we were never granted.
Being argued at hurts. Watching a man argue at somebody else, at close range, with everything he has, delights. This is why the syllogisms please. They are aimed past our heads. The flea has bitten her and bitten him, their bloods are mingled in it, so the mingling has already happened and her objection collapses. The logic is fraudulent and we know it and we are not the ones being asked to yield. We get the rhetoric without the bill.
Fish sat down in the chair. Reading in 1990, inside a criticism organized around the critique of masculine rhetoric, he took the addressee's position and reported assault. I read the same work and feel intoxicated.
Donne turns to the reader at length in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and he says, No man is an island. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
There is the address, aimed at us, and it consoles. That passage left literature and entered common speech. When he speaks to somebody else we get intoxicated. When he speaks to us we get a proverb. Two pleasures, and they run on different circuits.
Donne's speakers lose. TThe woman in “The Flea” kills the flea, and the speaker has to improvise a new argument out of the wreckage of the old one. The woman in “Woman’s Constancy” has prepared her exit. The speaker of “The Apparition” is reduced to threatening her with his ghost, which is what a man does after running out of arguments. “The Sun Rising” wins its case against the sun, and the sun keeps rising. The Holy Sonnets ask God for violence and record no answer. A rhetoric this overwhelming, deployed this often, with this rate of failure, might be doing something other than domination.
Hans Robert Jauss gives us the vocabulary for the rest, and Dayton Haskin gives us the evidence. Every generation reads the Donne it needs. The eighteenth century could not read him at all. The Victorians recovered a churchman named Dr. Donne through Izaak Walton's biography, and printed the sermons. Grierson edited him and T. S. Eliot reissued him as the poet of unified sensibility, after which admiring Donne became a credential in modernist company. The the New Critics found the well-made conceit. John Carey found an apostate consumed by ambition. Marotti found a coterie careerist working the patronage circuit. Fish found a coercer. Each of those was the real Donne to the people reading, and each reading tells you as much about its decade as about the poems.
Who loves Donne in 2026?
Donne returns as the poet of the unpermitted address, in a decade that has thought harder about consent to being spoken to than any since the Victorians. Every screen we own delivers speech we did not ask for. We have built an entire apparatus of blocking, muting, unsubscribing, and opting out, and we have grown a fine sensitivity to the demand made without invitation. Donne's imperatives land in that atmosphere and feel dangerous again in a way they did not feel to the the New Critics, who heard only wit. His speaker demands, and accepts that he might be refused, and gets refused, and demands again. That combination has become rare. We are surrounded by address that cannot be argued with and by argument that risks nothing. Donne risks everything on a syllogism and loses.
Roland Barthes divided texts that give pleasure from texts that give bliss. The first confirm the reader in what he already is. The second unsettle him and put his relation to language at hazard. Donne belongs in the second category, and the people who love him love a small controlled annihilation, administered by a stranger, on a schedule of their own choosing, in a room where the door stays open.
Donne's contemporaries copied his poems out by hand into commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies, and Deborah Aldrich Larson has used those books as evidence for his early reputation. What a man chooses to transcribe with a pen is a record of pleasure, made at cost, without an audience, and there are hundreds of such records. The Variorum commentary volumes digest three and a half centuries of what readers said about the Songs and Sonets. Nobody has read either archive with the question of intoxication in hand.
Some readers will always find the voice a bore, and Lewis was too good a critic to be wrong about what he felt. He was wrong only in thinking that what he felt disqualified the poems. He felt the grip. So do I. I close the book with my pulse up and no idea whether the argument was sound, and I go back the next night to be worked on again, from the doorway, while he talks to somebody else.
I’m a voyeur. I like to watch.
