ABSTRACT

The most obscure and elaborate poem of Donne strikes more deeply into the truths of nature and the heart of man than the most brilliant production of the clever rhymer of Twickenham.

[Donne’s coarseness and needless difficulty must be allowed; nonetheless, his ruggedness is often the condition of his success.] there is a strangeness, an appearance of labor, resulting from the intense, crowding energy of the poet’s thought, an energy that cannot stop to arrange its expressions, to choose its figures, that strikes the iron at a white heat, moulds it, often awkwardly, but always leaves it with a stamp of power: I cannot propose a better instance of this

poetical gift, the essence of his moral character, was effort, struggle. No one could be further removed than he from such simple sweetness as that of Spenser. Donne was always at war with the elements of style, bending them, rending them, straining them to match the sweeping tide of his thoughts and passions. Sometimes he conquered, and soared into the highest heaven of poetry; sometimes he was worsted and sank to depths lower than the lowest of prose. The effort he makes in the latter case, the distortions he produces, are painful, like the scratching of a pin on glass, as in the hideous exaggeration so often quoted.