in what way Donne's treatment of love is different from that of the Elizabethan sonneteers? illustrated with example
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Answer:
The speaker in John Donne’s ‘The Triple Fool’ doesn’t give either loving, or writing poetry about loving, much of a good press. Although this poem isn’t actually so much a love poem as a lament about what happens to poetry when it escapes into the world at large, its idea of what a ‘love poem’ is still resonates with us today. Much of what Donne’s speaker implies about the nature of love poetry is recognisable to modern understandings of the term. Like in ‘The Triple Fool’, when we talk now about ‘love poetry’, we most commonly mean poetry that is concerned with romantic or erotic love (or both), rather than other kinds of love – love for family, friends, or a god, for instance. Love poetry as described by Donne’s speaker here is personal, giving voice to individual feelings and longings, formally intricate (‘rhyme’s vexation’), and heterosexual, with a male poet writing about a female object of attention and desire.
There is something in this, but love poetry in Renaissance England is in fact much more various and diverse than ‘The Triple Fool’ suggests. Renaissance poets and lovers produced love poetry in a huge variety of forms — ranging from sonnets and sonnet sequences, to lyrics, songs, ballads, elegies, and much more. Some of these forms were new to 16th-century England — such as sonnets, imported from Italy in the works of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), and the numerous French and Italian poets influenced by him. Others, such as lyrics, formed an important part of English medieval literary and religious culture. Some love poems circulated in manuscript (i.e. a handwritten text) among small and exclusive groups of readers in particular social worlds, such as the royal court, the universities, or the London legal establishments known as the Inns of Court, while other poems appeared in print to a wider, popular audience. Increasingly, love poetry appeared in both.
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