This session, sponsored by the John Donne Society, traces the aesthetic and philosophical inheritances of John Donne’s work in twenty-first-century poetry. Recent years have seen a growing critical investment in the ongoing urgency of Donne’s writings for contemporary audiences, witnessed in part both by the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project, which originated at Fordham University and involved readings of poems in dialogue with Donne at Barnard College, the New York Public Library, and Fordham, and by the 2017 publication of John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Judith Herz (Palgrave). This session expands the existing conversation by broadening the aesthetic terrain of Donne’s influence, in order to demonstrate the variety of ways that literary influence manifests in texts.

Three presenters will offer 18-minute papers:

Theresa DiPasquale: “Compared with me”: Four Nocturnals”: Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day” begins by observing that “all” things around the poem—the sun, the stars, the earth, the moisture of the earth—are “spent” (3), “sunk” (5), shrunken “to the bed’s feet” (7), “Dead and interred” (8); and “yet,” the opening stanza concludes, “all these seem to laugh, / Compared with me, who am their epitaph” (8-9). As the epitaphic poem continues, it (or the persona it represents) claims to have undergone a radical kenosis, an emptying out that has left him/it “nothing” (22), but not “an ordinary nothing” (35). This inscribed persona is, rather, an extraordinary nothing, an inscribed Word that defines itself by saying, “I am none.” How are readers to respond to such a text? The three 21^st-century poets whose work this paper discusses have written “Nocturnal”s of their own that illuminate the nothing at the heart of Donne’s poem.

Sean McDowell: “‘Metaphysical,’ ‘Meditative,’ and the Poetry of Donne and Ronald Johnson” grows out of the definitional questions Louis Martz engaged in the two editions of The Poetry of Meditation and a handful of articles. Johnson’s ARK is consistently defined as a “metaphysical poem.” What does that mean in the context of Donne, the vogue for the Metaphysical Poets, and the sharp distinctions Martz drew between terms?

Harold Veeser, "From Donne to Busta Rhymes: Rebirth of the Baroque": As indicated in a rich flowering of work ranging from that of Monika Kaup to that of Krista Thompson, we are in the midst of a full-scale neobaroque aesthetic renaissance. Donne’s established importance to Nightwood by Djuna Barnes was the first event in the neobaroque revival. Donne has gone on to influence several of the FLARF poets, including Robyn Schiff, Nada Gordon, Hailey Leithauser, and Sandra Meek. This paper will also show Donne’s evident importance to neobaroque hip-hop music, especially to the MTV videos of Hype Williams, in particular those featuring Janet Jackson and Busta Rhymes. Finally, Donne’s generative power is evident as well in the neobaroque paintings of Kehinde Wiley. The point of this paper will be that Donne has central importance in the neobaroque revolution that is now underway.

Following the papers, the presider will moderate unstructured discussion in response to the papers.