ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace of the history of literature that Jonson literally dominated the age in which he lived…. There was only one poet who shared even in part this literary supremacy of Jonson, and that poet was John Donne. To Donne, especially to the Marinist in him, must be granted the credit-if credit it be-of delaying for more than a generation the natural revulsion of English literature back to classicism and restraint. This is not the place in which to discuss the interesting relations of Jonson and Donne. Except for a certain rhetorical and dialectical address, which might be referred to a study of the ancients, the poetry of Donne is marked by its disregard of conventions, by its extraordinary originality of thought and expression, by that rare quality of poetic insight that justifies Jonson’s enthusiastic claim that John Donne [was] the first poet in the world in some things.’ Not less significant on the other hand are Jonson’s contrasted remarks to Drummond on the same topic: ‘That Donne’s Anniversary [in which true womanhood is idealized if not deified] was profane and full of blasphemies’, and ‘that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging’. The classicist has always regarded the romanticist thus, nor have the retorts been more courteous, as witness the well known lines of Keats’ Sleep and Poetry in which the age of classicism is described as ‘a schism nurtured by foppery and barbarism’.
