tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21432259.post114520876978827911..comments2023-09-07T18:57:41.344+01:00Comments on Early Modern Whale: To find the mind's construction in the faceDrRoyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01351695058512676554noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21432259.post-1145227554776546622006-04-16T23:45:00.000+01:002006-04-16T23:45:00.000+01:00'He never seems to see beyond that' (the female fo...'He never seems to see beyond that' (the female form), interjects Phoenix. Might make a good essay subject. But however reified Donne may make women in his poems, they engage intensely with what the women they invent are thinking (That 'Except she meant ... what ere shee meant' note). Not that this makes them any less provocative!<BR/>As for reply poems, the indignant 'Philo-Philippa', writing her commendatory poem on Katherine Philips, is probably about as near as you will get, and Margaret Lucas mocks Donne as 'Dr Costive' in 'The Comical Hash'. In Tudor court poetry, there's far more of a sense of male-female dialogue (I mean in the Wyatt circle, or Anne Vaux writing to the Earl of Oxford). But in the end, wouldn't any woman writer answering Elegy 18, or the other elegy you mention, have had an agenda set for her? A. L. Rowse egregiously co-opted Emilia Lanier's poems as 'The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady', making them into an adjunct to an ill-founded theory about Old William: let's not go the same way. (Maybe this is just my sneaky way of trying to leave a space in which Donne can continue to be done). But thanks for being interested. Roy.DrRoyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01351695058512676554noreply@blogger.com