Traces of Nothing: self-reflecting acts of writing in John Donne’s love poems

• Main Author: Guillaume Fourcade
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut du Monde Anglophone 2012-04-01
• Series: Etudes Epistémè
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/412

All but four of John Donne’s poetical works were published after his death and in his lifetime their author seems to have carefully restricted the circulation of manuscript drafts of his poems to friends and patrons. Such relative authorial secrecy has contributed to putting their creation at a distance and it is hardly surprising that, except for a few piecemeal remarks, Donne did not leave any theoretical commentary upon his poems nor on the poetical choices that presided over their composition, in other words upon the act of writing those texts. However, this article argues that the act of poetic creation, that is to say the definition and enactment of poetic principles, does appear indirectly, as an underlying trace, in some self-referential poems. Through a series of close readings, this study purports to show how, through two fictional screens, the self-reflexive, metapoetic comments in “Negative Love”, “The Will” and “The Undertaking” translate at a further remove into remarks whereby the act of writing reflects upon its own features. The fact that they revolve around a void core or essential “nothing” which in turn becomes a mode of self-definition for the texts and the act of composition at work in them is central to all three poems. This article thus intends to underline the playfulness with which the texts and the act of writing ironically confess their “nothingness”.