Seminar Questions: 17th Century Poetry, Part I

Seminar Questions for Weeks 1-3 

**You should read these before approaching the poems and prepare short answers for 2-3 questions to share with the class. Make sure you answer questions on more than one poet.

How do John Donne’s religious poems articulate the language of political absolutism?

Describe how the poets use tone, diction, imagery, form and content in Donne’s “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” and George Herbert’s “Affliction IV”?

What do you think Samuel Taylor Coleridge meant when he said:

With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,

Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;

Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,

Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.

                                    (“On Donne’s Poetry”, Literary Remains (1836))

In what ways do the poets we read respond to the political and religious conflicts of their age?

How does Donne represent the relationship between the soul and the body?


What common themes emerge from the poems we read? Are there any contradictions?


How does Donne address God? What impression of God does this give you?

Do you agree that Donne’s poems all reveal an obsession with the power of the individual will?

How do Donne and Jonson use poetry to discuss the physical body?

Do you think 17^th century love and devotional poems exploit the language of passion and religion?

Many of the poems we read were initially intended for circulation in manuscript among a small coterie of peers. Do you think that this has an impact on their address to the reader?

In what ways does print culture affect the poetry of the 17^th century?

To what extent is there an expression of urgency in 17^th century writing by women to counter the period’s misogyny?

“Whereas the legal and economic structures of seventeenth-century society ensured women’s subordination to men, defending this through a panoply of ideological assertions, vast numbers of poems present the (would-be) mistress as all-powerful, able to kill her admirer with an angry glance, her will irresistible.” (Elaine Hobby, "The Politics of Gender", Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvel) To what extent is female strength misrepresented in 17^th century poetry?

Do you think Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry makes a convincing counter argument to contemporary theological ideology about women?

To what extent do you agree with Kate Chedgzoy’s assessment that the “feminist commitments” of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum constitute both an intervention in querelle des femmes debate as well as a plea to “reimagine the dominant narratives of the past that shaped the cultural world of the English Renaissance”?

Roy Strong argues that the court festivals demonstrate the extent to which the courtiers believed in a ‘cosmic harmony’ that governs the universe. How far does the 17^th century masque deliver representation of an idealistic harmony within the English court?