Hugh Grady’s John Donne and Baroque Allegory (2017) constructs a network of critical texts through which he sought to make sense of the hyper-real, commodified environment of postmodernity. Grady compares Walter Benjamin’s reading of allegory in seventeenth-century German drama with T.S. Eliot’s interpretation of the metaphysical conceit in Donne’s poetry. Benjamin claims that allegory, especially personification, expresses the reification of subjectivity consequent on the commodification of labor power. Eliot sees the conceit as an effort to hold onto the system of ‘correspondences’ that maintained the unity of the medieval world-picture. These critics identified the earliest glimmerings of aesthetic tendencies that grew with the process of commodification, reaching fruition in the simulacra of postmodernity in which reality and representation finally merge. However, George Klawitter’s book, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne (1994), suggests that Donne’s love poetry is addressed to a male recipient and that homoeroticism adds a subversive element to Donne’s recourse to the ‘correspondences’ of Aristotelian thought. Donne deploys the ancient homology between non-reproductive sexuality (‘sodomy’) and auto-reproductive money (‘usury’) to critique natural teleology’s entire system of ethics. Hawkes studies Donne’s Songs and Sonets to construct a supplementary critique of Grady’s theory of early modern aesthetics.