Hugh Grady’s stimulating study argues that Walter Benjamin’s theories of Baroque aesthetics, in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), provide a lens through which to read and appreciate John Donne’s poetry afresh. The uncertain, chaotic, fragmented world that Donne represents, particularly in his two long Anniversaries, has undeniable parallels with the melancholy spirit and allegorical mode of representation in the German Trauerspiel of the first half of the seventeenth century. Benjamin never refers to Donne, although Shakespeare is mentioned in his work on the Trauerspiel, but Grady argues that Benjamin’s later study of Baudelaire demonstrates that his aesthetic theories can be extended to Donne’s lyric poetry.

The two key chapters of the book establish the relevance of Benjamin’s theories to Donne through close readings. The Anniversaries, elegies on the death of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Drury, with their evocation of a world “in pieces, all coherence gone” (“First Anniversary: The Anatomy of the World,” line 213), correspond extremely well to the melancholy and fragmented world Benjamin describes, and the anxiety they express about the modernizing “new philosophy” of emerging scientific thought aligns with the crisis of modernity that Benjamin identifies. Indeed, the Anniversary poems provide such a good “fit,” as Grady puts it (1), with Benjamin’s theory that there seems little to prove—Benjamin’s vocabulary of mourning and fragmentation is already written into the poems, particularly “The Anatomy of the World.” Many readers may find the following chapter, extending the analysis to Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, more interesting, precisely because, as Grady acknowledges, the fit here with Benjamin’s theories is not so perfect (207). Donne, Grady claims, is “facing the same crisis Benjamin defined, but approaching it in his own way” (97). While he pauses on certain of the Songs and Sonnets, notably “A Nocturnall upon St Lucie’s Day,” that are comparable to the Anniversaries in their melancholy, he devotes much of the chapter to arguing that Donne’s “libertine” poems and his poems of mutual love can also be profitably read in the light of Benjamin’s theory. If the libertine poems stage transitory sexual pleasure as compensation for an empty world (103), the mutual-love poems replace the hope of religious redemption in the Anniversaries with the prospect of utopian erotic love, albeit an erotic utopia that is exclusive to the lovers themselves, transforming the public world into an empty signifier (123), in a dialectic of melancholy and redemption that Grady identifies as profoundly Benjaminian.

Grady’s approach does not radically overturn previous Donne criticism but, rather, demonstrates ways in which well-established readings of Donne’s work can be articulated using terms drawn from Benjamin. His introductory chapter, while giving a concise account of Benjamin studies and the scholarly history of the term Baroque in literary criticism, situates his own approach within a generous and wide-ranging survey of the history and present state of Donne studies, acknowledging current major projects, such as the Variorum edition of the poems and the Oxford Sermons edition, and their place in the currents of theoretically informed criticism he covers.

For Grady, Benjamin’s Baroque images—dialectical contradictions that emphasize extremes and resist mediation—provide a context and a vocabulary with which to theorize Donne’s use of the “metaphysical conceit” throughout his poetry. This is explored at length in the fourth chapter. The final chapter extends the discussion to a broader consideration of seventeenth-century manuals of wit and Benjamin’s theories of language. It is a pity that Grady devotes only five pages, at the end of the final chapter, to discussing Donne’s religious poetry in light of Benjamin’s theories. Although he disarmingly acknowledges that this is for “reasons of convenience and focus (and [his] own predilections)” (195), his overarching theory regarding the dialectical structure of melancholy and utopia could have been fruitfully developed with regard to the full range of the Holy Sonnets, as his treatment of his chosen two (“Batter my heart” and “At the round earth’s imagined corners”) amply demonstrates. But Grady expresses the hope in the opening chapter that readers will “make the connections of Benjamin’s theories with other segments of Donne’s creative productions” (51). I hope so too—this is a study that looks set to generate further discussion and interpretation.