For my third blog post in a row (yikes), I have a stray thought/question: doesn’t the corporeality and the baroqueness of Donne’s work make him feel like a poet of a rather Catholic sensibility? As opposed to Spenserian sanitized Protestantism. It’s interesting because, as we talked about in class, Donne literally was a Catholic poet until he converted to the Anglican Church. But it seems to me that the Catholicism sticks around in his work. Even in the Holy Sonnets, which are substantially less sexual and bodily than the poems we read for last class, the paradoxes that he plays with and the richness of his ideas+language lend the poems a sort of opulence. 

(Plus, the Holy Sonnets sequence play so perfectly into the trope of Catholic guilt. Holy Sonnet VII, IX, etc.)