[Michael F]

Re: Donne: Eppur lo sento.

The question is how, by what agency, the poet’s world takes order. In Donne, it is the triune God. In ESVM, it is creativity, the poet’s own. Both poets speak about making sense of unruly experience, in a sonnet, and both invoke the language of rape. So for me, the comparison is inescapable. IMO it’s noteworthy that creativity assumes an almost divine importance for ESVM, as it does for other ‘secular’ poets (e.g., Rilke and Stevens). Or Keats to Shelley: 'My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.' For Donne, in orthodoxy, it’s an aspect of the divine.