METAPHYSICAL RED HERRING
METAPHYSICAL RED HERRING

Summary/Abstract: American poet Adrienne Rich borrows the title of British metaphysical poet John Donne’s famous poem, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” not because her poetry is also “metaphysical” or because the two poems are similar one way or another (they are not), but just because this title suited the occasion of her poem, i.e. the death of her husband. So our incursions into the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth-century England and the work of John Donne (and the specific poem of that title) can simply be viewed as the result of a red herring pulled across the innocent reader’s tracks by the fiercely feminist (mildly put) author.

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