ABSTRACT
As for his poetry, if Donne has admirers who, like Browning’s make virtues of his worst defects, they will not be satisfied with Mr Gosse’s criticism. This, while it does not fail in appreciation of Donne’s occasional music, the beauty and the splendor of certain lines and phrases, his intellectual vigor and abundance, and the penetrating spiritual suggestion of some parts in contrast with the daring sensuousness and sensuality of others, is, nevertheless, severe upon the roughness of his metre, the extravagance and absurdity of his conceits, the gross exaggerations whereby he aimed at the sublime and fell miserably short, and the misplaced and sickening adulation which he lavished on unworthy men and women who had done nothing that deserved such monstrous praise. At the same time certain of Donne’s faults in poetry are explained in a satisfactory manner, and even for his faults of character there is pleaded in extenuation that they were such as were so common in Donne’s England, that to judge him by our modern standards would be most unfair.
