SOURCE: Beliles, David Buck. “Donne and Feminist Critics.” In Theoretically-Informed Criticism of Donne's Love Poetry: Toward Pluralist Hermeneutics of Faith, pp. 7-21. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following essay, Beliles provides an introduction to several feminist responses to Donne's Songs and Sonnets and Elegies, especially “Confined Love,” “Breake of Day” and “Sapho to Philaenis”— three poems that have a female narrator.

John Donne's love poetry has attracted a great number of women critics in the twentieth century. Several of the major scholars and critics of an earlier generation who made Donne central to their careers were women: Dame Helen Gardner first and foremost, Rosemond Tuve, and later Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. As one might expect, this trend has continued and expanded as more women enter the profession. With the rise of feminist criticism in the late twentieth century, one might also expect that Donne's stock would have fallen...