Here's where I started, as a Freshman at Amherst College, an enthusiasm for verse I did not entirely comprehend; a classmate of mine, Schuyler Pardee, and I went to our wonderful professor, G Armour Craig, with a proposal: Could we perhaps translate Donne for modern students? He was genial, did not laugh at us, though our project never got off the drawing board. Perhaps he recommended further courses, I cannot recall. What I do recall is that my classmate was one of the dozen fellow "poets" in my class, but he also was the first person I knew to commit suicide, a few years after graduation.

When I got to U MN grad school, I took Leonard Unger's 17C English Poets seminar, wherein we read Donne and his heirs. I wrote on Herbert and Andrew Marvell; the latter I later pursued in my Ph.D., This Critical Age: Deliberate Departures from Literary Conventions in 17C English Verse, advised by Leonard Unger. When I told him I wanted to write on Marvell, Leonard suggested the broader topic which proved so fruitful to me. Though one might not know it from his criticism, especially in American lit like TS Eliot, Leonard Unger I considered a professor of comparative literature. For example, his good friend Saul Bellow and he once composed, during lunch at the U MN Faculty Club on the top floor of the Student Union,
a verse translation of the first lines of the Wasteland--in Yiddish.

At a postdoctoral seminar at Princeton I first encountered the Donne First Edition, 1633. I was befuddled, like its first readers, by the intermix of body/ bawdy and religious poems. Having just completed my dissertation which noted Donne's having lifted "The Indifferent" wholesale from Ovid, Amores II.iv. One of the things Donne borrows is his shocking and dramatic shift of pronouns from third to second person, "I can love her and her, and you and you..." Ovid has "sive aliqua est," and six lines later, "sive es docta," then a couplet later, back to third person, "est quae," then back to "you," "tu, quia tam longa es"(line 33). He took his surprising shifting of tones, from distant connoiseur to precipitant leher: his "dramatic" pyrotechnics.

In my community college teaching career, I would recite a couple of Donne's poems from memory,
his Song, "Go and catch a falling star," illustrating adunata, the catalog of impossibilities, and sometimes
his holy sonnet, "At the round earth's imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise..."
I saw a first edition of the Songs and Sonnets during postdoctoral study at Princeton, and the confused intertwining of the love poems and holy pieces made clear how befuddled early Donne readers would have been.
Now for your delectation, an "adunata," list of impossibilities:
Go, and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root
Tell me where all past years are
Or--who cleft the Devil's foot.
Teach me to hear mermaid's singing--
Or to keep off Envy's stinging
Or find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind. ( )