ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the Reformation's influence upon English poetry. It begins with a brief consideration of Donne, then discusses Herbert and Milton at greater length. Donne's career marks the end of the Renaissance poetic ideal, of which something must first be said. Donne echoes the rhetorical violence of Luther, and perhaps out-does it. Herbert is a religious poet in a new and distinctively Protestant sense. His poetry is based in an assumption of the authority of the Word. This entails a fuller rejection of the humanist poetic self than is achieved by Donne. Herbert's dramatisation of the self belongs to the dialogical structure of faith: these worldly voices are only known in relation to the Word which opposes them. Milton is regarded by poets and critics rather as Luther is by liberal theologians: with grudging respect, reluctant reverence.
