SOURCE: Gorton, Lisa. “John Donne's Use of Space.” Early Modern Literary Studies 4, no. 2 (September 1998): 1-27

In the following essay, Gorton employs contemporary theories of cosmology and physics as a context for understanding Donne's poetry.

Donne's writing shows he was fascinated by new discoveries. He took up the modern idiom of maps and discovery with delight. But he was also deeply attached to the past, and his assumptions about space belonged to an old tradition: a cosmographic rather than cartographic way of imagining space. This paper is about Donne's spatial imagination: its cosmographic assumptions, and its many contradictions—between old and new ways of imagining the cosmos, between cosmographic and cartographic ways of imagining the world, and between his spatial imagination itself and his narrative voice.

We are almost always aware of where Donne's speakers are, but he creates that sense of place with startling economy: with prepositions rather...