ABSTRACT
Among the most striking poets of this Elizabethan age so fertile in poets and yet, curiously, so blotted by the blinding brilliancy of Shakespeare, is a figure of extraordinary variety-a scholar of civil and canon law, a wit, a poet, a preacher. There is but one man who answers to all the names upon this list-John Donne; and scholars have learned to appreciate the impressiveness of his name. It required powerful attainments to give Donne a reputation for incomparable legal learning, for unmatched pulpit eloquence; to make Ben Jonson, the competent critic, tell Drummond that John Donne was ‘the first poet in the world in some things’. Nor was his character less striking and wonderful. Of all the men in those rich days, we know most, perhaps, of Donne; and yet that fullness of knowledge merely means greater ignorance, such contrasts, antitheses, appear in him-sensuality and spirituality, worldliness and godliness, coarseness and refinement; characteristics which dwell together in society, but rarely in the individual. His nature and his attainments, all in their great variety, tax our imaginations to unify, to make alive.
