SOURCE: Raman, Shankar. “Can't Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne's Erotic Verse.”¹ Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 43, no. 2 (spring 2001): 135-68.

In the following essay, Raman analyzes s Donne's complex use of money, gender, and colonialist discourse in three erotic poems—“Loves Progress,” “Going to Bed,” and “The Bracelet.”

1

Suppressed by the licenser from the 1633 printed text of John Donne's poetry, the elegy “Loves Progress” seems also to have escaped sustained critical discussion, despite the twentieth-century revival of Donne studies. The comparative neglect does not, I think, derive simply from its being an “outrageous poem,”² but from a sense that the poem is perhaps too transparent. In the related—and much examined—elegy, “Going to Bed,” an intricate and provocative equation of physical consummation with religious ecstasy complicates the exuberant colonial metaphorics of “My America, my New-found-land,” sharpening the effect of transgression. By...