ABSTRACT
He defends Donne’s love-poetry against such detractors as Dryden and Johnson, who did not recognize its roots in actual experience. Yet he also rejects Gosse’s assumption that the poems chronicle specific encounters with women. He believes that Donne was chiefly interested in his own feelings, and dispensed with the trappings of courtly convention just because he was more concerned to explore the nuances of his love than to celebrate a mistress. Against conventional expectation, Donne testified that impassioned love is naturally sensual, and brought out the complexity of love, showing how opposite impulses intermingle in the passion itself. The love-poems have great emotional power because their subject is feeling.
