Donne in Literature
Donne has appeared in several works of literature:
- In Margaret Edson's Pulitzer prize-winning play Wit (1999), the main character, a professor of 17th century poetry specialising in Donne, is dying of cancer. The play was adapted for the HBO film Wit starring Emma Thompson.
- Donne's Songs and Sonnets feature in The Calligrapher (2003), a novel by Edward Docx.
- In the 2006 novel The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, Donne's works are frequently quoted.
- Donne appears, along with his wife Anne and daughter Pegge, in the award-winning novel Conceit (2007) by Mary Novik.
- Joseph Brodsky has a poem called "Elegy for John Donne".
- The love story of Donne and Anne More is the subject of Maeve Haran's 2010 historical novel The Lady and the Poet.
- An excerpt from "Meditation 17 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions" serves as the opening for Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls.
- Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead makes several references to Donne's work.
- Donne is the favourite poet of Dorothy Sayers' fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey, and the Wimsey books include numerous quotations from, and allusions to, his work.
- Donne's poem 'A Fever' (incorrectly called 'The Fever') is mentioned in the penultimate paragraph of the novel "The Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris.
- Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran writes a paper on Donne in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History, in which he ties together Donne and Izaak Walton with help of an imaginary philosophy called "Metahemeralism".
- Donne plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's The Noble Assassin (2011), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and putative lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford.
- Donne is featured prominently in a number of Gwen Harwood's poems, including "A Valediction" and "The Sharpness of Death".
Read more about this topic: John Donne
Famous quotes containing the words donne and/or literature:
“Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness:
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.”
—John Donne (15721631)
“This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.”
—Virginia Woolf (18821941)