ABSTRACT

Donne’s verse, as Mr Gosse truly says, differs from most Elizabethan verse in being strongly personal. He anticipated the modern habit of making his poetry a record of his own feelings and experience. We have in it the express image of a lawless, curious, headstrong youth, trying all life, searching all knowledge, experimenting in all pleasure. He was a rake, if you can call a man a rake who is a master of law, a proficient in theology. He was a student, if you can call a man a student when he is a kind of strong and self-contained Sydney Carton who combined hard living and high thinking. You have the forcible turbulent mind in the strongly knit turbid verse, with its restless activity of fancy, its directness of feeling contrasting with the strangeness of expression. But with all its intellectual brilliancy, Donne’s poetry was hard, until a legitimate love affair came to inform it with depth and height of feeling.