The Iconoclastic Imagination: John Donne’s Metaphysical Conceits

Can all images be “imagined”—that is, pictured or visualized by the “sight of the soul,” as Philip Sidney suggests in the Defence of Poesy? John Donne’s metaphysical conceits indicate, counterintuitively, no: Donne’s metaphysical poetry experiments with techniques of “visual paradox”—specifically, what I call the visual category mistake and imaginative oversaturation—to construct images that cannot be visualized. “The Flea,” for example, so contorts its central conceit that the flea itself, like a round square, becomes impossible to “see” with the mind’s eye. This chapter, in its broadest strokes, considers the impact of sixteenth-century iconoclasm on poets like John Donne, whose formal experimentation with poetic imagery disentangles the long-standing association between vision and imagination in premodern poetics and theories of mind. Iconoclasm is not typically understood as an aesthetic movement, but the violence that has come to define it emerged in response to a growing anxiety about the relationship between words, images, and the imagination: suspicion extended not just to the pictures, paintings, and statues of England’s Catholic past but also to books and the “speaking pictures” of the poetic imagination. Classical and medieval theories of mind inherited by early modern poets associated the powers of memory and imagination with vision—or rather, visualization, something poets sought to amplify through various cognitive and aesthetic techniques. But the mid-sixteenth century witnessed a surge of interest in skepticism, which, as Clark has argued, found expression in visual metaphors: optical illusions and other forms of visual paradox challenged the traditional association between vision and epistemological certainty. Iconoclasm gained traction in this moment by reinforcing an emerging idiom of visual mendacity, an anti-mimetic rhetoric directed at the representational arts in both religious and secular contexts. I argue that John Donne sits at the center of this conflict and that the unimaginable images of his poetry force us to rethink how the imagination worked for poets in the wake of religious iconoclasm in England: imagination may be the image-making faculty, but Donne’s poetry challenges easy alignments between word, image, and the embodied—that is, visual—imagination.