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:
“I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite;
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My worlds both parts, and Oh! both parts must die.”
—John Donne (15721631)
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. Thats what lasts. Thats what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of ones feelings or simply the idea of a silence in ones self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)