ABSTRACT
But, as in the case of the pastoral fashion, there were other currents of lyrical production, less directed by the conventionalities of the moment. Spenser aside, whose elaborated state does not lend itself readily to the shorter lyric, and whose singing robes are stiff with tissue of gold, wrought work, and gems inlaid, and Shakespeare, also, whose non-dramatic Muse is dedicated to thoughtful sonnet and mournful threnody, as well as to the sprightlier melodies of love, wine, and merriment, the most important poetical influence of this decade is that of that grave and marvelous man, Dr John Donne. I would respectfully invite the attention of those who still persist with Dr Johnson in regarding this great poet as the founder of a certain ‘Metaphysical School of Poetry’, a man all but contemporary with Cowley, and a writer harsh, obscure, and incomprehensible in his diction, first to an examination of facts which are within the reach of all, and, secondly, to an honest study of his works. Ben Jonson told Drummond that ‘Donne’s best poems were written before he was twenty-five years old’, i.e., before 1598, and Francis Davison, apparently when collecting material for his Poetical Rhapsody in 1600, includes in a memorandum of ‘MSS to get’, certain poems of Donne. The Carews, Crashaws, and Cowleys begin at least thirty years later, and, be their imitations of Donne’s characteristics what they may, Donne himself is an Elizabethan in the strictest possible acceptation of that term, and far in fact as in time from the representative of a degenerate and false taste. It is somewhat disconcerting to find an author whom, like Savage Landor in our own century, the critic cannot glibly classify as the founder of a school or the product of a perfectly obvious series of literary influences. Donne is a man of this
Few lyrical poets have ever rivaled Donne in contemporary popularity. Mr Edmund Gosse has recently given a reason for this, which seems worthy of attention, while by no means explaining everything. ‘Donne was, I would venture to suggest, by far the most modern and contemporaneous of the writers of his time…. He arrived at an excess of actuality of style, and it was because he struck them as so novel, and so completely in touch with his age, that his immediate coevals were so much fascinated with him.’ A much bequoted passage of the Conversations with Drummond informs us that Ben Jonson ‘esteemeth Donne the first poet in the world in some things’. An analysis of these ‘some things’, which space here forbids, will, I think, show them to depend, to a large degree, upon that deeper element of the modern lyric, poetic insight; the power which, proceeding by means of the clash of ideas familiar with ideas remote, flashes light and meaning into what has hitherto appeared mere commonplace. This, mainly, though with much else, is the positive originality of Donne. A quality no less remarkable is to be found in what may be called his negative originality, by which I mean that trait which caused Donne absolutely to give over the current mannerisms of his time; to write neither in the usual Italian manner, nor in borrowed lyrical forms; indeed, to be at times wantonly careless of mere expression, and, above all, to throw away every trace of the conventional classic imagery and mannerisms which infected and conventionalized the poetry of so many of his contemporaries. It seems to me that no one, excepting Shakespeare, with Sidney, Greville, and Jonson in lesser measure, has done so much to develop intellectualized emotion in the Elizabethan lyric as John Donne. But Donne is the last poet to demand a proselyting zeal of his devotees, and all those who have learned to love his witching personality will agree to the charming sentiment of his faithful adorer, Izaak Walton, when he says: ‘Though I must omit to mention divers persons,… friends of Sir Henry Wotton; yet I must not omit to mention of a love that was there begun betwixt him and Dr Donne, sometime Dean of Saint Paul’s; a man of whose abilities I shall forbear to say anything, because he who is of this nation, and pretends to learning or ingenuity, and is ignorant of Dr Donne, deserves not to know him.’
