John Donne's «Love's war»: form and deformation of love elegy

The article is devoted to the history of love elegy in Elizabethan England. Translations and imitations of the Roman elegy contributed to the development of this genre in England. One of the central figures in the Tudor canon of love elegy was John Donne who made it sound remarkably anti-Petrarchist. His elegies represent a shift of ages and use a completely new language of love poetry. The article analyzes Donne's «Love's Warre» in which he consistently reproduces poetic conventions of the Roman elegy. Donne's spontaneous development of thought displaces deliberate proportionality of the Ovidian form and gives way to a new kind of poetry.