ABSTRACT
So much by way of instance and of indication, for what such summary fingerpointing may be worth, concerning those poets, and they are the majority, who use the method of intense and suggestive concentration not continuously but by strokes and flashes, as the occasion or their inspiration bids them. Now for the minority who by principle or instinct pack and condense and concentrate and compress habitually and all the time. They are for the most part the same in whose poetry the element of intellect plays the largest and most restless part along with the elements of imagination and emotion. We have reminded ourselves how at a certain stage of Shakespeare’s work the purely intellectual element thrust itself into a predominant place among his other tremendous gifts and faculties, and how it put into the mouths of his characters poetry of a more strenuous concentration, a denser imaginative and intellectual tissue, so to speak, than before. Among some poets of Shakespeare’s generation and the next there existed both a passion and a fashion, much stimulated by the study of certain Spanish and Italian models, for intellectual athletics, sometimes of a highly fantastical kind. The most consistent and indefatigable of mental athletes in our Jacobean poetry was-it is needless to say to such an audience as this-John Donne, the Dean of St Paul’s. From the range and depth both of his attainments and experiences, and the mingled elements of sensuality, cynicism, and intense brooding piety in his nature, the work of Donne derives a quality unique in our literature. In his hands poetry turned away from many of the pleasant conventions, pastoral, Petrarchan, and allegoric, beloved by Spenser and his followers, to concern itself with the hot and urgent realities both of earthly passion and spiritual travail and aspiration. At the same time he went beyond all his contemporaries in his love of acrobatic thought-play and of forcing together
strong and chafing current of his verse, which runs turbid with all manner of substances and among them a high proportion of gold. Let us consider a passage in his characteristic though not at all in his extreme manner. He had written verses defying and belittling the power of death. Now, death having carried off a virtuous and excellent lady of his acquaintance, he recants and declares
Spiritual treason, atheism ‘tis to say That any can thy summons disobey. Th’ earth’s face is but thy table; there are set Plants, cattle, men, dishes for death to eat. In a rude hunger now he millions draws Into his bloody, or plaguy, or starved jaws.
