The verse letters of John Donne: A study of the rhetorical traditions of the verse epistle

This thesis attempts to set forth the traditions in which the verse epistle of the Renaissance was written and to place the verse letters of John Donne in those traditions. Chapter I includes a review of the existing critical literature, a brief sketch of the place of the verse epistle in the canon of Renaissance poetry, and a review of the basic precepts of rhetoric.;Donne's complimentary epistles are treated in a similar manner. Chapter IV discusses the complimentary tradition of the verse epistle, and, as with the deliberative epistle, the Renaissance principle of decorum and the didactic theory of poetry in their application to the complimentary epistle are treated. Donne's Renaissance predecessors in the complimentary epistle are also examined. Chapter V examines in detail three representative examples of Donne's complimentary epistles.;The conclusions reached in this study are several. The first, and most significant, is that it is necessary to know the traditions of the verse epistle in order to understand and appreciate both the deliberative and complimentary epistles of Donne. The second conclusion, and a corollary to the first, is that an understanding of the verse letters, although written in a different tradition than Donne's other, more popular poems, does cast light on the rest of his poetry. The third and more general conclusion is that an awareness of the importance of rhetoric is essential not only in the study of the verse epistle in the Renaissance, but also in the study of all Renaissance poetry.;The concluding chapter offers some suggestions for further study, such as an investigation of the influence of logic on the verse of John Donne, but the primary conclusion reached in the study is that Donne's verse letters are indeed worthy of consideration in themselves.;Chapter II concerns itself with the epistolary tradition into which Donne's deliberative epistles fall. The structural and formal aspects of the verse epistle, as well as the Renaissance principle of decorum and the didactic theory of poetry in their application to the verse epistle, are discussed. In order to give a firm sense of the tradition, some of Donne's Renaissance predecessors in the deliberative epistle are examined. Chapter III considers in detail four fairly representative examples of Donne's deliberative epistles.