Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise

In his occasional poetry, and especially in his two elegaic Anniversary poems, Donne created a special symbolic mode in seventeenth-century poetry of praise and compliment. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's reading of the Anniversary poems recognizes them as complex mixed-genre works which weld together formal, thematic, and structural elements from the occasional poem of praise, the funeral elegy, the fu...