Skepticism In John Donne’s Anniversaries

In the western history of philosophy,skepticism is sometimes a way to examine the validity of knowledge in order to gain true knowledge,and sometimes a thought tradition to criticize and deconstruct without constructing a new system of knowledge.When faced with the shock brought by great changes in the early modern period,such a philosophical tradition was paid intense attention by European intellectuals then.John Donne’s skeptical poetics manifests in the mixed genres,paradoxical content and ambiguous language.Through close reading of The Anniversaries in its historical contexts,this thesis proposes that the two poems do not completely fit into the genre of Protestant meditation and sermon,literary anatomy or Renaissance epideictic poetry.The first chapter attempts to discuss why The Anniversaries do not completely fit into the Protestant meditation and sermon.Written after the English religious reformation had abolished the institutions and doctrines of the Catholic Church,the two poems as Protestant meditation and sermon still hinted at Catholic ideas in their language and the use of imagery.The second chapter mainly focuses on the antithetical relationship between the two poems as literary anatomy and counter-anatomy.Despite that the two poems together have been recognized as anatomy and sometimes satire,they actually form a pair of antithesis in form and content,making a pair of anatomy and counter-anatomy.As is suggested by the title of the first poem,“The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World” adopts the genre of literary anatomy in its partitioning and analyzing of the world’s corruptness that it seeks to criticize,which shows its admiration of reason.But the second poem,“The Second Anniversary: the Progress of the Soul” is full of anti-rationalism.Because it argues that only surface knowledge is accessible to men,and no matter how one employs the tool of reasoning to analyze the surface knowledge,it is an act that will end in vain and only turns out to prove men’s ignorance.At the same time,there are self-contradictions within these two poems themselves: the first poem that adopts literary anatomy,a genre that uses the method of partitioning and analysis,criticizes the intellectuals’ partitioning of worldly knowledge and severance between the earth and the heaven;the second poem adopting the anti-rational counter-anatomy is paradoxically full of the intense desire toward knowledge and reason.The third chapter proposes that although The Anniversaries follow the genre of Renaissance epideictic poetry,they are paradoxical in their choice of subject matter and the way it is praised.While using the topoi of the Renaissance epideictic poetry,they violate the decorum of this genre by using the extravagant style to praise a maid who enjoyed no particular social renown before her premature death,so that they exemplify the features of paradoxical encomia,a genre originating from classical rhetorics.As paradoxical encomia,the poems are full of self-contradiction.Sometimes they even refer to the paradoxes in themselves,which makes them self-referential,self-critical and self-reflexive.And as typical paradoxical encomia do,they refer to the contemporary social discourse and participate in its construction.The poems participate in the reconfiguration of the notion of purgatory,displacing the purgatorial process of cleansing with poetic imagination and intellectual scourge in the site of poetry.The mixed genres,paradoxical content and ambiguous language show Donne’s being affected by the gradually disenchanted world during the early modern period.It also demonstrates how he tried to reinvest meanings into the meaningless life and world in such a time by integrating religious belief and the pursuit of truth.