ABSTRACT:

T. S. Eliot succinctly concludes that “a thought to Donne was an experience.” This statement is paradoxical in nature as a metaphysical thought is expressed through a secular experience. Metaphysical thinking characterizes Donne's poetry as metaphysics is to define an abstract idea through empirical entities, and, as Eliot notes, Donne is good at turning a thought into an experience and giving an illustration or elaboration of a metaphysical idea. For Adorno, “metaphysics, because it attempts to regard the Ideas as something linked to the empirical world but endangered by advancing secularization, was itself threatened from the first in its own development.” As metaphysics purports to grasp what is essential, this purpose is simultaneously questioned and counteracted by its own movement. Nonetheless, the controversy in this movement happens to define the possibility of metaphysics—that is, its possibility lies in its difficulty and impossibility of self-definition. This essay aims to discuss how Donne presents love in his love poems as he relates love to concrete particulars and secular experiences in a metaphysical approach. At the end, in Donne's love poems, love as an abstract idea deconstructs itself in its definition as it is no longer pure or abstract. Nonetheless, love's engagement with objects and subjects in a social context shows how far Donne's presentation of love reaches what it is not (or its opposite) and the empirical world, and thus reveals how much Donne's understanding of love might speak of the truth of love in the world.

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