Jack DonneからDr.Donneへの展開 : 同一人の内的発展の契機について

As L.P. Smith says "John Donne is still a puzzle"; it is generally realized that Donne has a very difficult personality to understand. In his youth he seems to have been a secular kind of poet, full of worldly ambitions, and producing, on the whole, shocking, amorous poems; but later he becomes a grave Dean of St. Paul\u27s writing innumerable splendid sermons and religious poems. We are apt to think there are two quite different people dwelling in him; the gay and amorous Jack Donne and the grave and divine Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul\u27s. To find a continuity between these two personalities and to try to reconcile them is the purpose of this article; for Jack Donne and Dr. Donne are one and the same person, and the works of his youth reveal many of the germs of his later works. In other words, his spiritual development shows psychological unity; such characteristics as his earnest search for the truth, his non-worldliness, his melancholy heart as he thinks of the vanity of the world, are already seen in Jack Donne\u27s works. These gradually develop into the brighter flame in the works of Dr. Donne. A little research will readily show in what parts of the earlier works these germs are seen and how these germs develop in his later works