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Anniversaries
work by Donne
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discussed in biography
- In John Donne: Poetry of John Donne
…sustained of Donne’s poems, the Anniversaries, were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury. These poems subsume their ostensible subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world. Elizabeth Drury becomes, as Donne noted, “the Idea of a…
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place in English literature
- In English literature: Donne
…unworthiness that culminates in the Anniversaries (1611–12), two long commemorative poems written on the death of a patron’s daughter. These expand into the classic statement of Jacobean melancholy, an intense meditation on the vanity of the world and the collapse of traditional certainties. Donne would, reluctantly, find respectability in a…
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