Der Tod im Leben – John Donnes Jenseitsästhetik

Abstract

The essay enquires into evidences of the beyond in John Donne’s Anniversaries. In describing Donne’s attempts not only to give a comprehensive account of the depravity of a world incurably sick, failing and near its end, but also to gain a truly metaphysical understanding of postmortal life in a resurrected body, I outline his poetics of liminality and transition. Asking how death is engrained in life and how life enters and indeed survives death, Donne unfolds, in virtuoso performance and reflexion of allegory, a topology of relationality together with an impressive monumentalization of his own poetic brilliance.