ABSTRACT
Harrison supposes that Donne takes from Plotinus his notion of a love which can be defined only by negatives, quoting ‘Negative Love’ in confirmation; and he discovers in Donne’s reported reply to Ben Jonson’s criticisms of the Anniversaries ‘the secret of Donne’s treatment of woman’. The secret is that Donne]
was interested in her not as a personality, but as an idea. In solving the nature of this idea he recurred to certain Platonic conceptions by which he thought to explain the source of her power.
