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The Rhetoric of Donne's Sermons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Herbert H. Umbach
Herbert H. Umbach*
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University
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Extract

The value of John Donne's poetry has ever been acknowledged to the extent that, together with Spenser and Jonson, he has been conceded leadership in the English Renaissance. Until recently, however, the Dean of St. Paul's has only casually been touched upon as a prose writer of pronounced merit. This neglect Coleridge hinted at when, in his Table Talk, June 4, 1830, he wrote: “Why is not Donne's volume of sermons reprinted at Oxford?” Of all Donne's prose, the sermons seem to me to be most important. Meritorious as they are for content (which does not interest us here), Donne's sermons best display his mature ability as a man of letters, wherefore as a master of English homiletic style Donne deserves his place among the leading writers of his day.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1937 , pp. 354 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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References

page 354 note 1 Donne's prose works are the following: Pseudo-Martyr; Conclave Ignati; three printed folios (referred to as LXXX, L, and XXVI) of Sermons; Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; Juvenilia, or Certain Paradoxes and Problems; Biathanatos; Essays in Divinity; and Letters to Several Persons of Honor. For details concerning editions, as well as commentaries upon and criticisms of these works, consult Geoffrey Keynes' A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, second edition (Cambridge, 1932), and Mrs. E. M. Simpson's A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford, 1924). For representative portions of the sermons, consult Logan Pearsall Smith's Donne's Sermons, Selected Passages (Oxford, 1919).

page 354 note 2 Life and Death of Dr. Donne, prefixed to LXXX Sermons (1640), sig. B 3 recto.

page 354 note 3 Op. cit., pp. 19 and 20.—On the influence of sermons upon the evolution of English prose style, see R. W. Chambers' monograph On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, E.E.T.S. (1932); chapter 4 in George Philip Krapp's The Rise of English Literary Prose (1915); and W. Fraser Mitchell, op. cit., p. 5.

page 354 note 4 Chap. 12: ut doceat, ut detectat, ut flectat. Sister Thérèse Sullivan in her edition of the De Doctrina Christiana, Liber Quartus, Catholic University of America Patristic Studies, xxiii (1930), 10 and 102, discusses the indebtedness of Augustine at this point to Cicero's Orator and De Oratore.

page 354 note 5 A third edition of this work appeared in 1606, published in Hanover. I quote Mitchell's résumé (p. 95): “His work is divided into two books, of which the former deals with the composition, the latter with the delivery, of the sermon. Composition is concerned with treatment (tractatio), which is concerned in turn with invention (inventio) and disposition (dispositio) in close relationship, and embellishment (exornatio). Invention embraces consideration of the text (praecognitio textus quoad scopum), division (partitio), and explanation of the passage (explicatio verborum); disposition consists of amplification, which along with explanation would form the body of the sermon, and application; the latter can be general or specific. Embellishment may be effected by sheer simplicity and clarity (simplici perspicuitate), by wealth of language (copia), by effective arrangement (efficacia), or by figures (figuris). The second book treats in an obvious way of voice and gesture.”—The gist of Donne's method of sermon construction is contained in the above summary. Notable, also, is Donne's regular use of Latin Scripture phrases, frequently paraphrased or translated into English.

page 354 note 6 In the frequently incomplete marginal outline printed in the folios these heads can be seen.

page 354 note 7 See, e.g., the letters to Sir Henry Goodyer in The Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, edited by Edmund Gosse, ii, 141 (“ … sending you the sermon that you do me the honour to command”) and 152, to whom he had previously written, “I will pretermit no time to write it, although in good faith I have half forgot it”; the sermon which he delivered “faithfully exscribed” at Whitehall in April, 1627, when the king (through Laud) seemingly had found fault with it, and Donne was commanded to furnish a copy for examination, discussed by John Sparrow in “John Donne and Contemporary Preachers,” Essays and Studies by … the English Association, xvi (1930), 165 and 166; the postscript of the letter to the Earl of Dorset from Chelsea, November 25,1625, in John Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (London, 1929), p. 489: “… how I have spent this Summer in my close Emprisonment [because of the plague]. I have reviewd as many of my Sermons, as I had kept any notes of; and I have written out, a great many, and hope to do more. I ame allready come to the number of 80: of which my sonne who, I hope will take the same profession, or some other in the world of middle understandinge, may hereafter make some use.” The eighty sermons mentioned are not to be confused with LXXX, since in the latter there appear many sermons of a date later than the year in which this letter was written. To the existence of exactly such notes as Donne speaks of we owe the later materialization of the L and XXVI folios in particular, the bulk of LXXX having before his death been formulated by Donne himself when, in a time of sickness at Aubrey Hatch in 1630, he utilized the time in “revising my short notes” (cf. the titles of LXXX, Nos. 71 and 72, and the varice lectiones of sermons surviving in manuscript as well as in print).

page 354 note 8 For Donne's theory, cf. especially LXXX, No. 19, pp. 183 and 184; No. 31, p. 305; L, No. 21, p. 176; and Essays in Divinity, ed. of 1651, p. 84.

page 354 note 9 See Mary Paton Ramsay, Les Doctrines Médiévales Chez Donne, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1924).

page 354 note 10 “Defence of the Epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada,” 1672, in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), i, 173–174. Cf. Richard F. Jones, “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration,” J.E.G.P. xxx (1931), an essay partially incorporated in Ancients and Moderns, Washington University Studies, New Series, no. 6 (1936).

page 354 note 11 Hayward, op. cit., p. 554.

page 354 note 12 See George Saintsbury's A History of English Prose Rhythm (London, 1912), pp. 162 and 163, for a passage from LXXX, No. 2, p. 13.