The unique position of John Donne’s metaphysical love poetry in Renaissance poetry: A close reading of ‘The Flea

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Department of Anglophone Studies), course: A Survey of British Literature, language: English, abstract: As the title of this paper suggests this paper claims that Donne’s metaphysical love poetry takes a unique position in Renaissance literature. Hence this paper aims at revealing and highlighting main themes and characteristics of Donne’s love poetry. However, the focus will be on Donne’s metaphysical love poetry. That is why the paper will start with defining what metaphysical poetry is and what its key features are. These preliminaries will be followed by the main analysis. In order to prove the main thesis of the unique position of Donne’s love poetry the erotic and highly metaphysical poem ‘The Flea’ is chosen to be examined as a representative example. But at first I will have a closer look at the poem in terms of content, language and style. Afterwards the paper will close with a concluding comparison of the characteristics of Donne’s metaphysical love poetry (found in ‘The Flea’) to popular Elizabethan poetry.