ABSTRACT

For Donne was essentially a modern poet. One can imagine him in complete sympathy with the realists, imagists, and vers librists of the last decade and a half. ‘Hardness’, ‘the exact word’, ‘intensity’, ‘no compromise with public taste’, ‘accommodation of metre to sense’, ‘the deeper, subtler rhythms of common speech’, etc., etc., —these all seemed to be cardinal articles in Donne’s poetical creed. The contemporary revival of interest in the whole group of ‘Metaphysical’ poets has concentrated on Donne and has not neglected his metrics. Readers of all classes have been attracted and piqued by him. Poets like J.C.Squire and T.S.Eliot have been called (sometimes, indeed, with overstatements of the case) ‘Metaphysical’ in both style and substance; and so have Hardy and Meredith. Richard Aldington, a true classicist among vers librists, often mentions Donne and Cowley in his criticisms; and even such American poets of the youngest generation as Glenway Westcott have been carried away by Donne’s religious sonnets. A friend of mine-an amateur poet (for he ‘has published nothing as yet’), who reads verse with the long, chanting cadence so popular today —was overjoyed to pick up Grierson’s edition of

college students and teachers of my acquaintance have shown themselves fascinated both by what he has to say and by the manner and form in which he says it.