ABSTRACT
Donne, moreover, introduces the fashion of elaborate and fanciful metres, and of his seventy lyrical poems scarcely two are written in the same verse form, a peculiarity which he transmitted directly to Herrick. Donne, however, entirely ignored quantity and regularity, and was one of the most untidy versifiers of the Elizabethan age, while Herrick’s unfailing neatness is one of his most characteristic charms. He found the limited range to which the Elizabethan poets confined themselves irksome. His adventurous spirit demanded a larger license than that which had satisfied his immediate predecessors, and throwing to the wind every bond and convention, both of thought and form, he broke out into lawless revolt. Campion, whose work was most probably of much earlier date than Donne’s, showed in his verse-construction an invention of almost equal fertility, but whereas the great variety of verse forms shown by Campion may be partly due to the object their author had in view when composing them, Donne’s
Gosse’s admirable essay; they will find it both a fascinating and exhaustive comprehensive introduction. Indeed, no poet could be said more truthfully to be ‘of imagination all compact’, or resemble more strikingly the picture of the poet, as Theseus portrays him, than John Donne.
