ABSTRACT
I am not thinking so much of the obscurities, the roughnesses, the grotesque conceits, the studied eccentricities that mar so much of Donne’s poetry…. In matter of this sort every age has its own standards, and it is useless to complain because those of the seventeenth century are not ours. But Donne’s offence lies deeper. To speak plainly, there are extant poems of his which are fit only for the dunghill.
