John Donne
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John Donne as a young poet, John Donne often utilized metaphors of spiritual bond in many of his Songs and Sonnets in order to explain fleshly love. Once he renounced Catholicism and converted to the Anglican faith, Donne donned a more devotional style of verse, such as in his Holy Sonnets, finding parallels to divine love in the carnal union. In many ways, however, his love poems and his religious poems are quite similar, for they both address his personae's deep-seated fear of isolation by women and God, respectively.
Whereas many of Donne's love poems display a speaker's anxiety and anger about his inability to sustain affection from a woman, Donne transferred that theme of resentment towards women to frustration with God because he personally doubted his salvation. Why would Donne have felt unfulfilled spiritually during the time in which he wrote the Holy Sonnets? Witherspoon and Warnke posit that "Donne's religious doubts seem to have been...settled" because after his conversion to Anglicanism, he led attacks against Roman Catholicism and published a treatise which encouraged English Catholics to take the oath of allegiance.
While Donne abandoned Catholicism for Anglicanism willingly, records indicate that he did so primarily for reasons of self-preservation and self-advancement. I propose that despite his genuine attempts to embrace the Anglican faith, he encountered seemingly insurmountable liturgical roadblocks that caused a long-lasting religious disorientation...