Renaissance Humanism

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lies in the fact that while the woman’s beauty is not physically comparable to the sun or a rose, Shakespeare still loves her and sees her potential, which therefore surpasses the power of the beauty of nature. In this way, much of the vocabulary represents the Renaissance understanding of human superiority over nature, a dominant idea in the movement of humanism.

Maybe the most extraordinary of English poets is John Donne, who led a most courageous uprising versus the traditional romanticism of Elizabethan love poetry. Gaining inspiration heavily from Francesco Petrarca, Elizabethan poetry was infused with allegories, pastoral imagery, and conventional love ideas of Renaissance England. Donne opposed traditional understandings of poetry and especially despised ordinary verse patterns with common meters. In writing his own sonnets, he broke the standard measures and classical lyrical phrases to declare his opposition to tradition, especially in his Holy Sonnets. More specifically, in Holy Sonnet 14 which is as follows: "Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you, As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me" (Puchner 769). Here, the writer asserts the case that reason, or understanding, should dictate mankind, reason that comes from within, not without. Part of the humanist movement is the relation to redemption, which arrives as the focus of Donne’s Sonnets, where the poet converses with God. In a sense, Sonnet 14 questions the doctrines of Catholicism by addressing God directly. In other sonnets, such as The Flea, Donne places passion on a human level, but it is in the Holy Sonnets where Donne communicates on a more metaphysical level, searching the way of humans and the divine through extreme metaphors and vivid language, such as the phrase, "ravish me" when speaking to a divine being. In the Holy Sonnets, Donne demonstrates that his version of humanism is more intensely emotional but also more realistic.

Humanism recognizes the significance of the experience of people, and a person’s relationship to the natural environment. It, therefore, guarantees the independence of artistic advancement, the interest, the courage of research and the discovery of the inner spirit of man. At the start of the Renaissance, European academics became more conscious of the ancient works of the Greeks and Romans that Islamic societies and separate Jewish and European teachers had protected. Many academic leaders held these records and theories above the contemporary European writing. They adopted the outlook offered in the classics that was so separate from much of the theological thought of the era. Ancient works proposed that time on Earth had value. Before this, most understood that providing for eternity was superior to concern about everyday life. Their thoughts of the antiquated documents and their connections with other societies led scholars to conclude that individuals had the potential to do exceptional things and not be restricted by the severe social roles of the Middle Ages. These modern approaches regarding people and their lives became the basis of a theory called humanism. Humanists still kept their faith and believed in life after death, but they also felt their days on Earth should be prosperous; those who could manage it encompassed themselves with fine art and architecture. They enjoyed debating opinions and sharing worldviews. People started to notice the potentialities of what they could achieve in life, leading to modern day post-modernism.