An investigation of the denotative value of Donne's imagery

Abstract

This dissertation is an exposition of some of the qualities which make Donne's imagery so precisely denotative. In the first instance, our concern will be with the sensuous particularity, which determines the nature of the meaning of Donne's imagery. A certain emphasis will be given to the vestigial visualization in the poetic image. However, we shall see that his visual imagery does not display physical meaning, but has a representational value. A note, therefore, will be made of the referential quality of the visual imagery and an analysis of the kind of signification aimed at undertaken. A second point of investigation will be a classification and an analysis of the source material of imagery. In this, the aim will be to detect the relevance of the content for clear articulation of specific discourse. It will be seen how clarity and precision of meaning was related to the lack of poetic and emotional overtones of the image context. Our next concern will be to ascertain how far, in Donne, figurative imagery or tropology can be used to limit rather than to expand an idea. An effort will be made to see how figuration involved new and narrow implication as well as emphasis of theme. The final analysis will be directed towards discerning some organic link between the formal limits to meaning and the intention of the poems. The single group of Songs and Sonets will be analyzed as an illustration of corresponding patterns of denotativeness and communicative tones of poems. The study will be organized from the seventeenth-century critical perspective. The aim will be both to detect methods by which the quality of denotation in poetic meaning is achieved, and relate them to current theoretical and stylistic formulations.