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"With Holy Importunitie, With A Pious Impudencie": John Donne's Attempts To Provoke Election, Raymond-Jean Frontain

Quidditas

Donne's use of the imperative when addressing God in the Divine Poems is a maneuver designed to resolve a particularly Protestant dilemma, the same dilemma confronted by the speaker of Elegy 19 under another guise. As C. L. barber and Richard P. Wheeler have pointed out, the reformers' dismantling of "much of the Catholic apparatus of worship in order to isolate the individual worshiper in direct rapport with God through faith...put worshippers at risk in new ways. In areas where the Reformation triumphed, extraordinary anxiety could be generated by the absolute importance conferred upon the individual's faith in the grace …