My second book project answers an old, but never fully answered quandary: if T. S. Eliot had made but a whimper, would John Donne have made such a bang? In Make Me New: John Donne’s Other Lovers, 1911 to Post-9/11, I argue that Donne lives abundantly and differently in the imagination of painters, sculptors, artisans, librettists, and politicians whose fondness for the poet has less to do with Eliot’s claims about how modernity separated what Donne had conjoined: emotion and reason. In the first half of the book, I place a new focus on painters such as Stanley Spencer and Marsden Hartley who gave color and movement to Donne’s obsession with mortality and on tortured multi-media artists including Eric Gill and Charles Bukowski whose illustrations gravitated towards Donne’s violent spiritual eroticism. In the second half, I examine how large-scale revolutionaries including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Oppenheimer gave a new global scale to Donne’s ethical call for human belonging, and then close with studies of Donne’s appeal to monumentalist sculptors and to feminist illustrators of human suffering.
§ Stanley Spencer (1911 John Donne Arriving in Heaven)
§ Marsden Hartley (1940 The Last Look of John Donne)
§ Samuel Maitin (1971 No Man is an Island)
§ Sam Messer (1982 Memory is the Invention for John Donne)
§ Eric Gill (1938 Holy Sonnets)
§ Julien Green (sonnet translations & comparative reading of Dionysos)
§ Charles Bukowski (“no man is an island, especially at Hollywood Park” June 26 1984)
§ MLK, the UN, and Terrorists: Being Involved in Mankind
§ The Divine Doctor Atomic (John Adams, Peter Sellars, 2005; Benjamin Britten)
§ David Barr, Hannah Scott, Kris Martin and the Round Earth’s Corners
§ Clifford Rainey (2013 Devotions)
§ Lesley Dill (2011 Woman in Dress With Star, “The Relique”)
§ Lucile Bertrand (2016 No Man is an Island Installation)
§ June Wayne (1959 The John Donne Series)
§ Kelly Kruse (2017 My Iron Heart)
§ Sarah Perkins (The Good Morrow on Etsy)
§ Asha Carolyn Young (2020 Death Be Not Proud)
§ Sarah Rhys (2012 Burned Books - Donne)
§ Kathryn Launey (2017 Meditation XVII for Sandy)
§ Roger Barr (2015 Batter my Heart)