Achsah Guibbory

Unhardening the heart.

By Althea Downing-Sherer

Illustration by Iris Pope

This Valentine’s Day, as some of us face the perils of online dating or despair over unrequited crushes, Achsah Guibbory urges us to reframe love: not as conquest, but as devotion. 

Achsah Guibbory is a professor of 17th-century English literature at Barnard College, specializing in John Milton and John Donne. She has published multiple books, including Returning to John Donne; Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-century England; Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton; and The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Walking past room 409 of Barnard Hall, you might overhear Guibbory’s energetic lectures and her class’s laughter when she discusses Donne’s bawdy humor. 

Guibbory insists that the literature of the past is essential for understanding our present. When I took her Milton course my freshman fall, Paradise Lost became more than another ancient text; Milton’s loss of faith in broader institutions was a reflection of my own disillusionment with U.S. politics. Similarly, in her 17th-Century Prose and Poetry course, Donne’s Songs and Sonnets urged me to consider love’s role in our own time of ideological polarization. Guibbory’s classes emphasize that literature from the past can still provide valuable insight on contemporary issues—how does the state interfere with intimate relationships, in Donne and in our personal lives? How does Donne address the connection between the sacred and profane, and how have their division endured in 21st-century relationships? 

During our conversation, we discuss Donne’s view on “situationships,” possible solutions to gender polarization, and the role of love in a time of political unrest.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue and White: How did you first realize that you wanted to specialize in 17th-century literature, and was there a particular text that first drew you in?

Achsah Guibbory: Well, I didn’t intend to specialize in it. The first thing I read was Donne. I’d forgotten about this, but—this was at UCLA—there was a graduate seminar being taught by this one particular professor. We met at the Clark Rare Book Library, and we’re sitting at this beautiful wooden table, and he brought out some books. It was the first edition of John Donne’s poetry, and that was it. I thought “This poetry is sexy and it’s interesting, and a lot of it is about sex. It’s fun.” I’d never read anything like that. It felt modern and real. I fell in love with Donne.

B&W: Was there a particular poem that really struck you?

AG: Probably “The Good-Morrow.” It’s the most beautiful poem: waking up in bed with somebody, and your souls are awake, your body’s waking. That whole thing of being so physically close with a person that you can see yourself in their eyes, and they are looking at you, so they can see their reflection in you. It’s like two hemispheres. 

B&W: Why Donne? What does his writing on love and intimacy offer that more traditional, Petrarchan love poetry didn’t?

AG: It’s real. We’re in a private, intimate space of two people that are separate from the world.  An idea of private love that seems to me so different from the Elizabethan models of love and poetry. I hate to use the word relatable, but it seemed relatable. You could imagine yourself in bed with this person. It was like he had invented something different. I didn’t know at the time that he was the first person to write like this, but it just felt fresh. It was romantic but sexual. There was something spiritual and very bodily. Embodied love. 

B&W: How do you think Donne’s work compares to more modern, 20th-century love poets?

AG: There were a lot of 20th-century poets who were influenced by Donne, who absolutely loved Donne. One poet is Anthony Hecht, he was very deeply influenced by him. Elizabeth Bishop: She has these morning poems about waking up with the beloved. Adrienne Rich, too, although she’s also saying ‘He didn’t do it right. I’m undoing it. It’s a new language. It’s me. It’s a language for us women together, and it’s not his.’ But she’s obviously very influenced by him. It’s interesting, because a lot of queer women really love his poetry. 

B&W: I know you were talking [in class] about how there aren’t many gender markers in his poems.

AG: No, there are not. In some sense, it’s a lot more inclusive, because it’s sort of shocking. When you look closely at the language, there’s no gendered language. Or he even suggests that—in “The Canonization”—the “he” and “she” disappear. It becomes all one. He’s very anti-authority: political authorities, religious authorities. Again, that’s modern.

B&W: Much of your work on Donne explores how love poetry is intertwined with politics and power. How do you see politics shaping our intimate relationships, perhaps echoing Donne’s writing?

AG: Often, we are resistant to political authorities and laws. The invasion of your privacy, of your private relations, the feeling that you can legislate love or sex or who can marry. When you look at certain works from Songs and Sonnets, they are in conflict with authority. Authority is the church and everything. In addition to the political, I’ve become really interested in the idea of sexual love as devotion. It is a space for religious, spiritual, and sexual experiences that are separate from that intrusive world. The sexual and the spiritual are so intertwined; “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen is a good example. He is Donne’s inheritor. “Hallelujah”: Is that about sex? Is it about God? It’s about both. You can’t divide them. It’s the idea that love, a committed love between two people,—and with Donne it’s always two people, it’s not the polygamous ones—that there’s something holy and sacred and sexual and spiritual and that they’re indivisible. 

B&W: Donne famously insists on the interconnection between body and soul. In his work, how does bodily experience act as a vehicle for spiritual meaning, rather than an obstacle? And then, how might this relationship between body and soul shift when we recontextualize intimacy in a digital age when people are more interested in online dating?

AG: I don’t think he’d like online dating at all. Love must take a body. Love is not just abstract. I honestly think that he goes back to the whole thing of the incarnation. Donne is different, because I think he felt that the bodies and souls were far more connected than most people at his time did. That image of the two lovers, the two hemispheres, the two halves of a whole, in a way, is also like the body and the soul. Neither can really function without the other. The soul can’t function without the body for Donne, and the body is dead if there’s no soul. The spiritual, the sexual. How can you divide them sometimes? The Song of Songs is the most erotic, sexual book in the Bible, and there’s a lot of that in Donne. Both Catholic and Protestant readers read [the body] as an allegory of the relationship between God and His people, or God and the Church. What have you just taken out of it? The bodily, the sexual, is unholy. But what if you see it as part of holiness? 

B&W: That feels like a very radical way of thinking about the sexual and the divine, even today. Do you think that love and relationships can ever truly be divorced from politics and social structures, or is that separation itself just a fantasy?

AG: People in power always want to invade the private. There’s a policing of the family, which also means of sexual relations, because somehow the family is always a model for stability in society. So when there’s change, it feels very threatening to the status quo of a society. 

B&W: That obviously impacts the way people are dating, especially for women. A term I’ve seen discussed in the news is “heteropessimism.” Have you read about this? Basically, it’s heterosexual young women expressing hopelessness or embarrassment with the fact that they feel like their straight relationships are inherently patriarchal, but they can’t just stop liking men. Donne also explores gender divisions, if men and women can really be intellectual equals. What do you think we can learn from Donne’s writing on gender division in an age of increased gender polarization?

AG: There is increased polarization. In terms of men wanting to get married and women don’t. That’s a big difference. Somehow you could say that men have become more feminine. They’re the ones who want to settle down and be married and have children, and women have become more stereotypically not wanting those things.

B&W: Does Donne have an answer to these problems?

AG: There’s an idealized sense in which those gender differences perhaps get erased, because I don’t read those poems with the erasure of the gendered things as being distinctly gay. I read them as wanting to get rid of that polarization, a way in which we can be equal together, a part of a necessary whole. I think there’s something very optimistic about trying to imagine a different kind of relationship. It could be hetero, it could be not hetero. I’m thinking of a poem, “A Valediction: of Weeping,” where the man is worried the woman is weeping, but he’s also weeping. He’s afraid that her tears are going to overwhelm his tears and destroy their world, because their world is together, and there’s a longing for getting rid of that division, the opposition. Not division or opposition between the ‘he’ and the ‘she’. That’s what’s different about Songs and Sonnets. The libertine poems are all about conquest, and no faith in love. No one is true. The whole thing of being true is to be faithful and to be truthful to each other, but that only appears in these poems where there’s a wholeness, no conquest. There is desire for something that is not fighting, not oppositional. The opposition is always to that world outside that is trying to invade them, that threatens them, or parents that don’t want them together, or a church that doesn’t. The idea that spirituality and devotion between two people exists in a world where I don’t think [Donne] has much faith in institutions.They’re their own world, one with peace and harmony, and no subordination. 

B&W: Donne is writing during a time of intense cultural and political instability. He’s facing religious persecution, shifting political regimes, and scientific discoveries that are completely reshaping how people understand the world. Right now, we are facing a similar existential dread. How does Donne confront this sense of uncertainty?

AG: Oh, he had it, yeah. He had it. I mean, he even wrote about suicide. He wrote a whole tract about it. Is it natural? Is it a sin? He even suggested that you could see Jesus’s crucifixion as willingly allowing himself to commit suicide. He had this obsession with the idea the world was deteriorating and decaying. We were at the end times. Don’t we have so much of that anxiety right now? That’s what he was living in. That’s another reason why Donne really connects with me, because I grew up with a father who kept saying, “the world’s gonna end soon, and you wouldn’t really want to be alive when it does.” I always had this existential anxiety. When I read Donne, I thought “that’s my man.” That’s another piece of it. The desire to find another world there, some kind of peace and trust. 

B&W: What do you think the role of love is amid political upheaval and existential dread when many larger institutions—including our college—are facing widespread instability?

AG: Again, this makes me think of Donne’s poems: trying to find a place, even just for a moment. That whole image of one little room, making “one little room an everywhere.” You try to build a place of peace and love and stability, hoping that stability will last in a world that is shaken and feels very unstable. It’s interesting.

B&W: It feels like a relationship can act as opposition to the upheaval that’s going on.

AG: Yes, exactly. Look for something where you can find happiness and pleasure, even if it’s something small, like having a good meal. 

B&W: Relatedly, in class, you alluded to recent conversations about young people dating less, having less sex, and approaching relationships differently. How do you think young people today are conceptualizing love and intimacy differently?

AG: It shifts from year to year. Two years ago, I was doing a senior seminar about Donne and the Metaphysicals. We were talking about love, and a number of students would tell me that what they really believed in was polyamory. Really, I’m not kidding. In fact, one actually wrote their senior thesis on polyamory. They did want commitment. They just wanted to love many people. I’m saying things may shift from year to year. Now, that is not so much what I’m sensing.

B&W: Do you know what a “situationship” is? Have you heard that term before?

AG: Tell me. I think I do. Are they having sex with each other?

B&W: Yeah, sometimes. When two people are talking, sort of dating, but they’re not committed. What do you think John Donne would feel about the situationship?

AG: Depends on how old he was. My guess is, looking at the Elegies, just fine. Looking at some of those Songs and Sonnets, not fine. And you can’t say he grew up; we really don’t know. He could be writing them at the same time. 

B&W: In general, what might Donne have to teach us—or warn us—about contemporary relationships?

AG: What I see in poems like “The Good-Morrow” is not to give up hope for finding that person, as opposed to “Love’s Alchemy,” who has no faith. The lack of faith, the inability to have faith in anything, is a real risk we have. Just in the world, what can we trust? That’s true about love, but it’s also a general thing. So when I think about that, I think: “would I want to be the cynic who doesn’t believe in anything?” Is that the way I want to live my life? Or do I want to live my life with the possibility that something could work out? There’s something hopeless about one, and I find it difficult to find hope, but I also find it important. I have one rabbi I particularly like; he’s the only person who gets me. He’s all about justice and love, and he said this beautiful thing about how love is something that makes you soft and vulnerable, but that’s what we need in the world. I love that. It made me think of Donne, actually. When you harden your heart,—he was talking about sin—the stony heart is that image of the sinful heart, but it’s also the heart that can’t let any love in. 

B&W: That's why I like Donne so much. Even when he is uncertain about things, he’s still quite earnest.

AG: He is. This is the other thing. It’s not okay to despair just to despair. Where does that lead? It leads to suicide, it leads to inaction. If we hope to do any good in the world, despair won’t let us do it. I’ve been writing about teaching and why it means so much to me, and it really is because of that. I want to give a sense of hope that I didn’t have at that age. I want to give a sense of hope and of possibility to people during this dark time. For me, Donne is about hope, not just darkness.

B&W: In your book Returning to John Donne, you write that you hope to engage with Donne not out of “nostalgic reverence for the past, but out of a conviction that the past can still speak to us, if we can recover and understand its language.” What does it take for you to truly “recover” Donne’s language today?

AG: I think it can still speak to us. And I think sometimes it sheds light on where we are, too. And I was thinking recently about the similarity between when you try to understand yourself, you think about your past experiences, like with psychoanalysts. All that stuff is so important to understand the past, to be able to live in the present as well. So I think there’s really an analogy between that.

B&W: Why do you think Donne specifically is still so relevant? Why should people still read him?

AG: Because the poems are about human experience. The experience of love may be different at times, but I think certain basic things about human beings are there: love, hate, disappointment, regret, excitement, orgasms. He writes about real stuff.

B&W: You’ve been at Barnard for over 20 years now. Do you think teaching Donne’s poetry to younger audiences has changed your relationship with it over time?

AG: I always learn from my students. I wonder, why did I suddenly start thinking a lot more about sexuality and spirituality about halfway through the time that I was teaching here? I feel like I have a lot of freedom here in my classes. In some ways, I moved away from politics and more into sexuality and spirituality over the last several years.

B&W: As Valentine’s Day approaches, and as someone who has spent so much time with 17th-century love poetry, do you have any general reflections or advice about love to offer?

AG: You don’t want to know about my love life. Oh, I don’t know. Okay, let me just sort of ramble. How difficult it is to trust, but how necessary. Sometimes you have to trust, to take that risk. Go for it, but be selective. If it really feels right, it really probably is. That’s different from trust, because sometimes your inability to trust makes it hard to know if it feels right or not. If it really feels right, it probably is. And that’s non-gendered, which is the way I want it. I mean, I’ve had relationships, you know, and I thought they were really good, they worked, except then I realized later that guy just was totally not worth it. The only thing that was good was he was good in bed, and the rest of it wasn’t, or vice versa. That gets around the question of trust. You have to be open enough to find out.

B&W: I think Donne walks that line really well.

AG: Yeah, and that’s why I do think that those poems probably were connected to his relationship with the woman that he married. How can you even imagine that if you haven’t felt it? That feeling of being so one with a person, that’s a rare feeling. Even in a relationship, it’s not there all the time. That’s the thing. There are many kinds of love. There’s not just one. If you think there’s only one, then you really limit yourself.