This thesis has been a study of the conceit as employed in the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. It has suggested that the difficulty encountered in attempted classification of Donne's love-poetry may be partially resolved by a recognition of various voices or personae in the poems, several of which may be present within an individual poem. It has demonstrated the way in which Donne's employment of the conceit enabled him to express this variety of voices or personae simultaneously as they exchange positions of dominance and submissiveness within a poem.The thesis has illustrated its study of the conceit through the explication of four specific poems: "The Ecstasy," "A Valediction: forbidding mourning," "The Canonization," and "Love's Alchemy."

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This study argues that there is an essential unity to John Donne's poems and sermons. Chapter One is a survey of Donne criticism: Ilona Bell suggests Donne "seeks communion, but is continually prepared to recognize disjunction." It is argued that Bell's notion is validated in both genres where Donne renders concrete a movement of thought or emotion through figurative language. Chapter Two examines how the sermons move between the literal sense of scripture, and its multiform spiritual significance. Chapter Three examines the writerly tradition of the Church Fathers in relation to some of Donne's poetry. Augustine read the bible as a unified entity, The Word, and yet understood it through manifold meanings. Donne writes of the union of lovers' souls, yet weaves in the theme of inconstancy and separation. In sum, this study discusses how Donne's creation of figurative meaning produces both his literary intensity, and some parallels of spiritual discovery in his poems and sermons.

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Criticism on Donne???s Holy Sonnets has traditionally been concerned with trying to find an explanation for the doubt, anxiety, and despair that is often expressed by the speaker of those poems. In recent decades, critics have increasingly made recourse to Calvinist theology in an effort to explain these melancholy states of mind. The accounts that such critics provide of ???Calvinism,??? however, have been varied and largely inadequate, mainly because they fail to engage with Calvin???s work at the level it requires. My thesis seeks to correct such deficiencies by providing a detailed reading of Calvin???s view on salvation and the way in which it is received. Calvin argues that we obtain salvation through a firm and certain faith, a faith that is nevertheless attacked by the unbelief that still resides in the believer. In other words, there is a division between the flesh and the spirit within the soul of the believer, which means that he or she is never free (until death) from the sinful temptations of this life. This division, which Calvin invokes to reconcile the uncertainties of the Christian life with the assurance of faith, is dramatised in the Holy Sonnets. In the five poems that I analyse, the speaker is torn between a desire for righteousness and an inclination toward evil, a division that is also represented in the structural qualities of the text. The various temptations which the speaker registers and confronts (and often falls to) are, I believe, a demonstration of Calvin???s view that the regenerate person is in continuous warfare against the remnants of the flesh.

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Criticism on Donne???s Holy Sonnets has traditionally been concerned with trying to find an explanation for the doubt, anxiety, and despair that is often expressed by the speaker of those poems. In recent decades, critics have increasingly made recourse to Calvinist theology in an effort to explain these melancholy states of mind. The accounts that such critics provide of ???Calvinism,??? however, have been varied and largely inadequate, mainly because they fail to engage with Calvin???s work at the level it requires. My thesis seeks to correct such deficiencies by providing a detailed reading of Calvin???s view on salvation and the way in which it is received. Calvin argues that we obtain salvation through a firm and certain faith, a faith that is nevertheless attacked by the unbelief that still resides in the believer. In other words, there is a division between the flesh and the spirit within the soul of the believer, which means that he or she is never free (until death) from the sinful temptations of this life. This division, which Calvin invokes to reconcile the uncertainties of the Christian life with the assurance of faith, is dramatised in the Holy Sonnets. In the five poems that I analyse, the speaker is torn between a desire for righteousness and an inclination toward evil, a division that is also represented in the structural qualities of the text. The various temptations which the speaker registers and confronts (and often falls to) are, I believe, a demonstration of Calvin???s view that the regenerate person is in continuous warfare against the remnants of the flesh.

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Tableau d'honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2007-2008. / The present thesis seeks to define the role played by the Metaphysical conceit in the formulation of John Donne's vision of a unified cosmos. The conceit is here regarded as an element of style that probes into the nature of relationships, as well as a unifying element in Donne's works that enables him to translate into verse the intangible ties that bind a man to other human beings and to the Divine so as to render an abstract reality more apprehensible to the mind. To him, the individual self is indeed defined almost exclusively in terms of the manner in which it relates to other human beings, to the divine, or to the political and religious institutions that regulate his society. In most of the works scrutinized in the present thesis, Donne is in fact concerned with the representation of an ideal of communion that involves the dissolution of the individual self into a greater whole. In the works analyzed in the present thesis, Donne almost invariably formulates this ideal in terms of the relationship that unites body and soul in an individual, which he conceives as a reflection of the way in which the material and the spiritual interact in the universe. In his exploration of the ties that bind human beings together and to the Divine, the Metaphysical conceit is vital to the expression of his ideal of interrelatedness. This thesis therefore focuses on the way in which the conceit, as a literary device that compares relationships, reinforces his vision of a unified cosmos. / Ce mémoire a pour but d'explorer l'utilisation que le poète anglais John Donne fait d'une figure de style appelée « Metaphysical conceit » dans sa description des relations entre individus ainsi qu'entre l'homme et le divin. L'intention de ce mémoire est de faire émerger le caractère unificateur de la «Metaphysical conceit» dans l'œuvre de Donne. En effet, cette figure de style permet à cet auteur de traduire en langage poétique les liens intangibles qui unissent les êtres humains les uns aux autres ainsi qu'à Dieu dans le but précis de rendre plus tangible une réalité abstraite. Pour Donne, l'être humain se définit presque exclusivement à travers les rapports qui l'unissent à ses semblables, à Dieu, ou aux institutions politiques et religieuses qui gouvernent la société au sein de laquelle il évolue. Dans la plupart des oeuvres analysés dans ce mémoire, Donne tente d'exprimer sa vision d'un idéal qui implique la dissolution de l'être dans un tout beaucoup plus vaste. Il illustre cet idéal à travers la formulation d'une image, celle de la relation qui unit le corps à l'âme chez l'homme, qui reflète en soi l'interaction qui allie le matériel au divin dans l'univers. L'étude des œuvres de prose et de poésie de Donne révèle le rôle prépondérant joué par la « Metaphysical conceit » dans la formulation de son idéal de communion. Par conséquent, l'objet de ce mémoire est l'étude de la manière dont la « Metaphysical conceit » renforce la vision qu'avait Donne de l'univers comme d'un tout uni.