The High, the Low, and the Comic in Donne

This paper proposes to refine the widely accepted function of "wit" in Donne's poetry -- I leave it to others, if they like, to extend the point to his prose -- by heuristically positing that category of intellectual sleightof-hand (the germ responsible for rampant epidemics of paradoxes [Colie, 1966]) as an effect of generic distortion, whereby an essentially dramatic structure is compressed into what Donne tellingly identifies, in "The Ecstasy", as a "dialogue of one" (74). Of course, we ar..