SOURCE: Fish, Stanley. “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power.” In John Donne, edited by Andrew Mousley, pp. 157-81. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Fish argues that in his poetry Donne exercises the power of language to dominate and control.

‘my Feigned Page’

For a very long time I was unable to teach Donne's poetry. I never had anything good to say about the poems, and would always find myself rereading with approval C. S. Lewis's now fifty-year-old judgement on Donne as the ‘saddest’ and ‘most uncomfortable of our poets’ whose verse ‘exercises the same dreadful fascination that we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore—the hot eyed, unescapable kind’.¹ Indeed my own response to the poetry was even more negative than Lewis's: I found it sick, and thought that I must be missing the point so readily seen by...