John Donne

John T. Shawcross

The collection includes elegies to Donne by his friends and the latest textual and critical discoveries regarding the popular seventeenth-centuries poet's work.

The Complete Poetry of John Donne

Ambiguity, present in all aspects of the poem, is seen as central to Milton's authorial intentions.

The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes

In this survey one may discover Milton as he saw himself and come to recapture some of his originality. The selections from A Milton Encyclopedia in this volume were written by experts in each subject.

Being Entries from A Milton Encyclopedia

Milton's English Poetry

Raymond-Jean Frontain

Frances M. Malpezzi

Donne's religious life ... - and the imaginative works that his religion inspired - are among the most troublesome sets of paradoxes and problems to emerge from the English Renaissance. Donne was born into one of the most visible and influential of Catholic families, yet he concluded his life as one of the most visible and influential spokesmen for the Anglican compromise. The author of poems of extraordinary interiority and of prose meditations that betray a pained self-scrutiny, Donne was fascinated by the conversion experiences of Saints Paul and Augustine, but, paradoxically, he left little conclusive evidence by which the modern reader or biographer may chart his spiritual progress. He has, alternately, been accused of guilt-ridden recusancy, condemned for gross political expediency, and lauded for maintaining an extraordinary integrity in a religiously volatile age. Every scholar who believes he has defined Donne's religious life is, ultimately, undone: there is always more.

Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross

John Donne's Religious Imagination

Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism

Intentionality and the New Traditionalism

Worthy T'have Not Remain'd So Long Unsung

Paradise Regain'd

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Critical Heritage Volume 1 1628-1731

John Milton

The facts of John Milton's life are well documented, but what of the person Milton -- the man whose poetic and prose works have been deeply influential and are still the subject of opposing readings? John Shawcross's "different" biography depicts the man against a psychological backdrop that brings into relief who he was -- in his works and from his works. While the theories of Freud, Lacan, Kohut, and others underlie this pursuit of Milton's "self," Jung and some of his followers provide the basic understanding by which Shawcross places Milton in the panorama of history. His explorations of the psychological underpinnings of Milton's decision to become a poet, of the homoerotic dimensions of his personality, and of his relationships with father and mother demonstrate the extent to which psychobiography proves itself invaluable as a means to appreciate this complex writer and his complex writings. This biography combines the traditional chronological narrative with a technique akin to that of fiction, "a mixture of times and a triggering of remembrances from various time frames without time differentiations." Such an approach offers a view of Milton "not only in being but in process of being." Shawcross's examination of two current concerns, gender attitudes and political ideologies, ranges Milton's work against the self he exhibits. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will find in this magisterial biography a wealth of new insight into one of the greatest of English poets.

The Self and the World

More often than not, critics have looked upon Milton's great epic not as a literary work but rather as a theological tract or a display of Renaissance learning. In this book John Shawcross seeks to redress that critical imbalance by examining the poem for its literary values. In doing so he reveals the scope and depth of Milton's poetic craftsmanship in his control of such elements as structure, myth, style, and language; and he offers new approaches to reading Paradise Lost as a literary masterpiece rather than a relic of religious history.

John T. Shawcross

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