Analyzing and Interpreting Literature / Unit 5 AIL 0427 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Donne's Constructed Lover
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The idea
The speaker of Donne's love poems argues, wheedles and reasons at a listener who never answers. He is a rhetorical position rather than a diary entry. Reading those poems as biography mistakes an argument in verse for a report of feeling, and the arguments are often deliberately overstated.
In practice
A rhetorical position, not a diary.
Where people slip
The overstatement is the argument.
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