ジョン・ダン

以前、懐かしい『幻魔大戦』にジョン・ダンの詩が引用されていたことを驚きをもって記したのですが、以下がその原文。
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/yasu-san/20090411/1239407211

John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions 不意に発生する事態に関する瞑想


"No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee...."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Metaphysical Poets
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cbqhq
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Metaphysical poets, a diffuse group of 17th century writers including John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert.

Mourning the death of a good friend in 1631, the poet Thomas Carew declared:

“The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purg'd by thee; the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted.”

The gardener in question was a poet, John Donne, and from his fresh invention blossomed a group of 17th century writers called the metaphysical poets. Concerned with sex and death, with science and empire, the metaphysical poets challenged the conventions of Elizabethan poetry with drama and with wit. And they showed that English, like Italian and French, was capable of true poetry.
Unashamedly modern, they were saluted by another great modernist, T.S. Eliot, who admired their genius for imagery, the freshness of their language and the drama of their poetic character.

But what do we mean by metaphysical poetry, how did it reflect an age of drama and discovery and do poets as different as John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert really belong together in the canon of English literature?

With Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London; Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham; and Tom Cain, Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne


Further Reading

Metaphysical Poetry ed. Colin Burrow (London: Penguin, 2006)

John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art rev. edn (London: Faber, 1990)

Stevie Davies, John Donne Writers and Their Work series (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994)

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ and ‘Andrew Marvell’, both contained in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975)

Achsah Guibbory, ‘John Donne’ in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry from Donne to Marvell ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 123-47

Andrew Hadfield, ‘Donne’s Songs and Sonets and Artistic Identity’, in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 206-16

Thomas Healy, ‘ “Dark all without it knits”: Vision and Authority in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House’ in Literature and the English Civil War ed. Thomas Healey and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 170-88

Thomas Healy, ‘Marvell and Pastoral’ in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 302-14

Thomas Healy (Ed), Longman Critical Reader: Andrew Marvell, (1998)