Abstract

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm."The John Donne of "A Valediction: Of Weeping" prefers the picture to the real. For Donne and for Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he is aligned in this essay, the preference principally involves issues of control. As Sartre writes, "It's not enough that a certain picture which I have in mind should exist; it is necessary as well that it exist through me."1 While the more conventional predilection for the virtual over the actual assumes the durability of art, Donne's sequential portraits in the poem confirm, as Sartre puts it, that "man's relation with being is that he can modify it". The vanishing...