ABSTRACT
He finds that many of Donne’s early poems ‘are outspokenly sensual and at times cruelly cynical’. We are told that there are three anniversary poems for Elizabeth Drury, ‘all containing beautiful and even splendid passages, but marred by overmultiplied and overstrained conceits and utterly preposterous hyperboles’. Donne consciously revolted against the manners of the earlier and contemporary Elizabethans, ‘their mellifluous monotones, their pseudo-classical nomenclature, their pastoral and other conventions’. He deliberately adopted a ‘hard and crabbed style’; and he stands curiously apart from ‘the master influences in poetry at home’, being ‘markedly influenced by Spanish literature’ yet remaining ‘original to a fault’.]
In virtue of his studied carelessness, his avoidance of smoothness of form, his pedantry, his infectious harshness, the ‘foremost of the metaphysical poets’ opens a new era, if he does not found a school.
