ABSTRACT
Among the non-dramatic poets who flourished under James I, incomparably the most singular and influential was the Roman Catholic scholar who became Dean of St Paul’s. John Donne was thirty years of age when Elizabeth died, and no small portion of his most characteristic work must have been written in her reign. But Donne belongs, essentially, to that of her successor. In him the Jacobean spirit, as opposed to the Elizabethan, is paramount. His were the first poems which protested, in their form alike and their tendency, against the pastoral sweetness of the Spenserians. Something new in English literature begins in Donne, something which proceeded, under his potent influence, to colour poetry for nearly a hundred years. The exact mode in which that influence was immediately distributed is unknown to us, or very dimly perceived. To know more about it is one of the great desiderata of literary history. The imitation of Donne’s style begins so early, and becomes so general, that several critics have taken for granted that there must have been editions of his writings which have disappeared.
