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영어

Among English poets of love, John Donne is unique in the diversity and complexity of his explorations. He explores various important aspects of human experience in his poetry. His individual poems express so many, even contradictory attitudes and feelings of love experience. His mind always travels from one type of experience to another. It does not stay in one world in any case. His entire works including love poems, divine poems and sermons show that his attitudes toward the important issues of life and religion are diverse and complex. And his diversity and complexity are the product of his awareness of change, namely, his concept of time as a process of decay. He does not think of mutability as an implacable external force. Rather, he sees that it is a part of himself, and to talk about himself is to talk about change. Many scholars argue that Donne’s variety and complexity are caused by his capricious and inconsistent disposition. But it is more convincing interpretation to say that they reflect the way by which he sees into the world and himself through the diverse kinds of love experience. His poetry articulates the insatiability and infinity of human desire. For all its various attitudes and feelings there exists a persistent desire to be happy and to have everything in his poetry. Although he knows that the human nature of always wanting more than we presently have causes suffering and pain, he never stops wanting more. His greatness lies not just in his diversity and complexity but in his inquiring mind that can never be satisfied no matter what the circumstances are.