Donne’s Paranoid Poetics

This article explores patterns of paranoid cognition and interpretation in John Donne’s writing, using his sermons, satires, and love poems as case studies. I analyze the discursive infrastructure of paranoid thinking through close attention to its grammatical, rhetorical, and logical symptomatology before considering the entanglements of paranoid affect and academic reading through the work of Paul Ricoeur, Eve Sedgwick, and (perhaps more surprisingly) T. S. Eliot.