ABSTRACT
As late as the 1880s Swinburne in England and Lowell in America independently wondered at the arbitrariness of literary reputation when they found so magnificent a poet as Donne still widely unacknowledged. That a great poet should cease to be recognised as such and for donkeys' years go belittled or neglected is a phenomenon that needs explaining. Was there a general aberration of taste? Did his times and concerns peculiarly cut him offfrom the eras that followed? The myth of Donne the modern has long been the received answer to these questions. It was a conscious modernism, partly defining itself by Donne, which credited Grierson and Eliot with the rediscovery of his poetry and hailed his return as the recovery of a lost mode of sensibility, or the harbinger of an intellectual revolution like the one he himself s supposed to have led. People still make it an article of faith that Donne's poems had a fashion in his own day and just after, then fell wholly into neglect until recent times when our like predicament showed us ourselves in them. We may acknowledge that our times have their distinctive view of Donne and yet require these assumptions to submit to tile facts.
