Imagery in Donne's Songs and Sonnets

Aristotle considered the capacity for image making as the greatest criterion of a poet's genius. Donne has marshalled a large number of images from a wide range of subjects to reinforce, energize, enliven and animate the central theme of Songs and Sonnets i.e the theme of love. This book presents a judicious identification, and systematic classification, tabulation and graphitization of the images in all the fifty five poems in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. It also attempts a systematic analysis of these images which led to a detailed discussion of their aesthetic and literary function. These images display the poet's thorough knowledge of a wide range of subjects. Thus they give the poetry an intellectual tone. However, the conceits are not in disharmony with the feeling in the poem; they actually add weight and illustrate that feeling giving rise to the impression of what T. S. Eliot called the 'unification of sensibility'.