The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne

Although John Donne enjoyed a reputation as a visitor of ladies during his lifetime, the poetry that he left in manuscript can lead modern readers to doubt that the objects of his affections were always women. Klawitter’s study contends that, in Donne’s later poems that have traditionally been read as heterosexual expressions of love, readers can find themselves lost in a welter of pronouns that, often insufficiently determinate of gender, can fit convincingly in a homoerotic context.