[From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 710-19.]
JOHN DONNE
1573-1631
Born, in London, 1573. Privately educated. Matric. Hart Hall, Oxford, 23 Oct. 1584. Took no degree. Probably travelled abroad, 1588-91. Admitted to Lincoln's Inn, 6 May 1592. With Earl of Essex to Cadiz, June 1596. Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Aug. 1596 to 1601. Wrote many poems and satires. Married secretly Anne More, niece of Lady Egerton, Dec. [?] 1600. Dismissed from secretaryship when marriage was discovered. Lived at a friend's house at Pyrford till 1604, then with brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Grymes, at Peckham; and subsequently lived at Mitcham. Gradually obtained favour at Court of James I. Degree of M. A., Oxford, conferred 10 Oct. 1610. To Germany, France and Belgium with Sir Robert Drury, Nov. 1611 to Aug. 1612. Studied theology. Ordained, Jan. 1615, and appointed Chaplain to King. Degree of D. D., Cambridge, granted at King's request, March 1615. Rector of Keyston, Hants, Jan. 1616, of Sevenoaks, July 1616. Divinity Reader toLincoln's Inn, Oct. 1616 toFeb. 1622. Wife died, 15 Aug. 1617. To Germany with Lord Doncaster, as Chaplain, April 1619. Dean of St. Paul's, 27 Nov 1621. Prolocutor to Convocation, 1623 and 1624. Rector of Blunham, Beds, 1622, Vicar of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, 1623. Died, in London, 31 March 1631. Buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. Works: "Pseudo-Martyr." 1610; "Conclave Ignatii," 1610 [ ?] (only two copies known); an English version of preceding, "Ignatius his Conclave" (anon.), 1611, "An Anatomy of the World" (anon.), 1611, "The Progress of the Soule" (anon.), 1621, "A Sermon" [on Judges xx. 15], 1622; "A Sermon" [on Acts i. 8], 1622; "Encaenia," 1623; "Devotions upon Urgent Occasions," 1624 (2nd edn. same year), "The first Sermon preached to King Charles," 1625, "A Sermon preached to the King's M[ajes]tie" 1626; "Four Sermons," 1625; "A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Da[n]vers," 1627; "Death's Duell," 1630; Posthumous: "Poems by J. D.," 1633; "Juvenilia," 1633, "Six Sermons," 1634; "LXXX Sermons," 1640; "Biathanatos,"1644; "Poems,"1649; "Fifty Sermons," 1649; "Essays in Divinity," 1651; "Letters to Several Persons of Honour, " 1651; "Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, etc.," 1652; "Fasciculus Poematum" (mostly spurious), 1652; "Six and twenty Sermons," 1660; "A Collection of Letters," 1660; "Donne's Satyr," 1662. Collected Works: "Poetical Works," ed. by Izaak Walton (3 vols.), 1779;(?) "Poems," ed. by Hannah, 1843; "Unpublished Poems," ed. by Sir John Simeon, [1856]; "Poems," ed. by Sir John Simeon, 1858; "Works," ed. by Alford, 1839, "Poems," ed. by Grosart (2 vols.), 1872-73. Life: by Walton, ed. by Causton, 1855. -- SHARP, R. FARQUHARSON, 1897, A Dictionary of English Authors, p. 84.
PERSONAL
To have lived eminent, in a degree
Beyond our lofti'st flights, that is, like Thee
Or t' have had too much merit, is not safe;
For such excesses find no Epitaph.
At common graves we have Poetic eyes
Can melt themselves in easy Elegies.
But at Thine, Poem, or Inscription
(Rich soul of wit, and language) we have none.
Indeed, a silence does that tomb befit,
Where is no Herald left to blazon it.
-- KING, HENRY, 1631? To the Memory of My Ever desired Friend Doctor Donne.
He was of stature moderately tall; of a straight and equally-proportioned body, to which all his words and actions gave an unexpressible addition of comeliness. The melancholy and pleasant humour were in him so contempered, that each gave advantage to the other, and made his company one of the delights of mankind. His fancy was unimitably high, equalled only by his great wit; both being made useful by a commanding judgment. His aspect was cheerful, and such as gave a silent testimony of a clear knowing soul and of a conscience at peace with itself. His melting eye showed that he had a soft heart, full of noble compassion, of too brave a soul to offer injuries, and too much a Christian not to pardon them in others. . . . He was by nature highly, passionate, but more apt to reluct at the excesses of it. A great lover of the offices of humanity, and of so merciful a spirit, that he never beheld the miseries of mankind without pity and relief . -- WALTON, IZAAK, 1639, The Life of Dr. John Donne.
Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford lived at the Innes of Court, not dissolute but very neat; a great Visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses; until such times as King James taking notice of the pregnancy of his Wit, was a means that he betook him to the study of Divinity, and thereupon proceeding Doctor, was made Dean of Pauls; and became so rare a Preacher, that he was not only commended but even admired by all who heard him. -- BAKER, SIR RICHARD, 1641, A Chronicle of the Kings of England.
This is that Dr. Donne born in London (but extracted from Wales,) by his mother's side, great great-grandchild to Sir Thomas More, whom he much resembled in his endowments; a great traveller; first, secretary to the lord Egerton, and after, by the persuasion of king James and encouragement of bishop Morton, entered into Orders, made doctor of divinity, (of Trinity College in Cambridge,) and dean of St. Paul's. -- FULLER, THOMAS, 1655, The Church History of Britain, vol. III, bk. x, par. 17, p. 324.
Dr. Donne, . . . a laureate wit, neither was it impossible that a vulgar soul should dwell in such promising features. -- HACKET, JOHN, 1693, Life of Archbishop Williams, § 74.
The life of Donne is more interesting than his poetry. -- CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.
Dr. Donne, once so celebrated as a writer, now so neglected, is more interesting for his matrimonial history, and for one little poem addressed to his wife, than for all his learned, metaphysical, and theological productions. -- JAMESON, ANNA BROWNELL, 1829, The Loves of the Poets, vol. II, p. 94.
The knowledge of Donne's immense learning, the subtlety and capacity of his intellect, the intense depth and wide scope of his thought, the charm of his conversation, the sadness of his life, gave a vivid meaning and interest to his poems . . . circulated among his acquaintances, which at this distance of time we cannot reach without a certain effort of imagination. . . . Dr. Donne is one of the most interesting personalities among our men of letters. The superficial facts of his life are so incongruous as to be an irresistible provocation to inquiry. What are we to make of the fact that the founder of a licentious school of erotic poetry, a man acknowledged to be the greatest wit in a licentious Court, with an early bias in matters of religion towards Roman Catholicism, entered the Church of England when he was past middle age and is now numbered among its greatest divines? Was he a convert like St. Augustine, or an indifferent worlding like Talleyrand? Superficial appearances are rather in favour of the latter supposition. -- MINTO, WILLIAM, 1880, John Donne, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 7, p. 849.
Against the wall of the south choir aisle in the Cathedral of St. Paul is a monument which very few of the thousands who visit the church daily observe, or have an opportunity of observing, but which, once seen, is not easily forgotten. It is the long, gaunt, upright figure of a man, wrapped close in a shroud, which is knotted at the head and feet, and leaves only the face exposed a face wan, worn, almost ghastly, with eyes closed as in death. This figure is executed in white marble, and stands on an urn of the same, as if it had just arisen therefrom. The whole is placed in a black niche, which, by its contrast, enhances the death-like paleness of the shrouded figure. Above the canopy is an inscription recording that the man whose effigy stands beneath though his ashes are mingled with western dust, looks towards Him whose name is the Orient. . . . It was not such a memorial as Donne's surviving friends might think suitable to commemorate the deceased, but it was the very monument which Donne himself designed as a true emblem of his past life and his future hopes. -- LIGHTFOOT, J. B., 1895, Historical Essays, pp. 221, 223.
His graceful person, vivacity of conversation, and many accomplishments secured for him the entree at the houses of the nobility and a recognized position among the celebrities of Queen Elizabeth's court. He was conspicuous as a young man of fortune who spent his money freely, and mixed on equal terms with the courtiers and probably had the character of being richer than he was. . . . The young man, among his other gifts, had the great advantage of being able to do with very little sleep. He could read all night and be gay and wakeful and alert all day. He threw himself into the amusements and frivolities of the court with all the glee of youth, but never so as to interfere with his duties. The favourite of fortune, he was too the favourite of the fortunate the envy of some, he was the darling of more. Those of his contemporaries who knew him intimately speak of him at all times as if there was none like him; the charm of his person and manners were irresistible. He must have had much love to give, or he could never had so much bestowed upon him. -- JESSOPP, AUGUSTUS, 1897, John Donne, Sometime Dean of St. Paul's, pp. 13, 18.
History presents us with no instance of a man of letters more obviously led up to by the experience and character of his ancestors than was John Donne. As we have him revealed to us, he is what a genealogist might wish him to be. Every salient feature in his mind and temperament is foreshadowed by the general trend of his family, or by the idiosyncrasy of some individual member of it. . . . The greatest preacher of his age. . . . No one, in the history of English literature, as it seems to me, is so difficult to realize, so impossible to measure, in the vast curves of his extraordinary and contradictory features. Of his life, of his experiences, of his opinions, we know more now than it has been vouchsafed to us to know of any other of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean galaxy of writers and yet how little we fathom his contradictions, how little we can account for his impulses and his limitations. Even those of us who have for years made his least adventures the subject of close and eager investigation must admit at last that he eludes us. He was not the crystal-hearted saint that Walton adored and exalted. He was not the crafty and redoubtable courtier whom the recusants suspected. He was not the prophet of the intricacies of fleshly feeling whom the young poets looked up to and worshipped. He was none of these, or all of these, or more. What was he? It is impossible to say, for, with all his superficial expansion, his secret died with him. We are tempted to declare that of all great men he is the one of whom least is essentially known. Is not this, perhaps, the secret of his perennial fascination? -- GOSSE, EDMUND, 1899, The Life and Letters of John Donne, vol. I, pp. 3, 11, vol. II, p. 290.
SERMONS
A preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures; and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend. their lives: here picturing a Vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a Virtue so as to make it beloved, even by those who loved it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible addition of comeliness. -- WALTON, IZAAK, 1639, The Life of Dr. John Donne.
The sermons of Donne have sometimes been praised in late times. They are undoubtedly the productions of a very ingenious and a very learned man; and two folio volumes by such a person may be expected to supply favorable specimens. In their general character, they will not appear, I think, much worthy of being rescued from oblivion. The subtility of Donne, and his fondness for such inconclusive reasoning as a subtle disputant is apt to fall into, runs through all of these sermons at which I have looked. His learning he seems to have perverted in order to cull every impertinence of the fathers and schoolmen, their remote analogies, their strained allegories, their technical distinctions; and to these he has added much of a similar kind from his own fanciful understanding. -- HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. iii, ch. ii, par. 70.
Donne's published sermons are in form nearly as grotesque as his poems, though they are characterized by profounder qualities of heart and mind. It was his misfortune to know thoroughly the works of fourteen hundred writers, most of them necessarily worthless; and he could not help displaying his erudition in his discourses. Of what is now called taste he was absolutely destitute. His sermons are a curious mosaic of quaintness, quotation, wisdom, puerility, subtilty, and ecstasy. The pedant and the seer possess him by turns, and in reading no other divine are our transitions from yawning to rapture so swift and unexpected. He has passages of transcendent merit, passages which evince a spiritual vision so piercing, and a feeling of divine things so intense, that for the time we seem to be communing with a religious genius of the most exalted and exalting order; but soon he involves us in a maze of quotations and references, and our minds are hustled by what Hallam calls "the rabble of bad authors" that this saint and sage has always at his skirts, even when be ascends to the highest heaven of contemplation. -- WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1859-68, The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, p. 237.
The sermons of Donne, while they are superior in style, are sometimes fantastic, like his poetry, but they are never coarse, and they derive a touching interest from his history. -- BOTTA, ANNE C. LYNCH, 1860, Hand-Book of Universal Literature, p. 476.
In Donne's sermons, an intellectual epicure not too fastidious to read sermons will find a delicious feast. Whether these sermons can be taken as patterns by the modern preacher is another affair. It will not be contended that any congregation is equal to the effort of following his subtleties. In short, as exercises in abstract subtlety, fanciful ingenuity, and scholarship, the sermons are admirable. Judged by the first rule of popular exposition, the style is bad -- a bewildering maze to the ordinary reader, much more to the ordinary hearer. -- MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 253.
During this year, 1622, Donne's first printed sermon appeared. It was delivered at Paul's Cross on 15 Sept. to an enormous congregation, in obedience to the king's commands, who had just issued his "Directions to Preachers," and had made choice of the dean of St. Paul's to explain his reasons for issuing the injunctions. The sermon was at once printed; copies of the original edition are rarely met with. Two months later Donne preached his glorious sermon before the Virginian Company. . . . Donne's Sermon struck a note in full sympathy with the larger views and nobler aims of the minority. His sermon may be truly described as the first missionary sermon printed in the English language. The original edition was at once absorbed. The same is true of every other sermon printed during Donne's lifetime; in their original shape they are extremely scarce. The truth is that as a preacher at this time Donne stood almost alone. Andrewes's preaching days were over (he died in September 1626), Hall never carried with him the conviction of being much more than a consummate gladiator, and was rarely heard in London, of the rest there was hardly one who was not either ponderously learned like Sanderson, or a mere performer like the rank and file of rhetoricians who came up to London to air their eloquences at Paul's Cross. The result was that Donne's popularity was always on the increase, he rose to every occasion and surprised his friends, as Walton tells us, by the growth of his genius and earnestness even to the end -- JESSOPP, AUGUSTUS, 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xv, p. 229.
GENERAL
One thing more I must tell you; but so softly, that I am loth to hear myself: and so softly, that if that good lady were in the room, with you and this letter, she might not hear. It is, that I am brought to a necessity of printing my poems, and addressing them to my Lord Chamberlain. This I mean to do forthwith: not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies. I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution; and I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations, but I am at an end, of much considering that; and if I were as startling in that kind as fever was, yet in this particular, I am under an unescapable necessity, as I shall let you perceive when I see you. By this occasion I am made a rhapsodist of mine own rags, and that cost me more diligence to seek them, than it did to make them. This made me ask to borrow that old book of you, which it will be too late to see, for that use, when I see you; for I must do this as a valediction to the world, before I take orders. But this is it, I am to ask you: whether you ever made any such use of the letter in verse, a nostre comtesse chez vous, as that I may not put it in, amongst the rest to persons of that rank, for I desire it very much, that something should bear her name in the book, and I would be just to my written words to my Lord Harrington to write nothing after that. I pray tell me as soon as you can, if I be at liberty to insert that: for if you have by any occasion applied any pieces to it, I see not, that it will be discerned, when it appears in the whole piece. Though this be a little matter, I would be sorry not to have an account of it, within as little after New Year's-tide, as you could. -- DONNE, JOHN, 1614, Letter to Sir Henry Goodyere, Dec. 20, Alford, vol. VI, p. 367.
Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse
Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse;
Whose every work of thy most early wit
Came forth example, and remains so yet;
Longer a-knowing than most wits do live
And which no affection praise enough can give!
To it, thy language, letters, arts, best life,
Which might with half mankind maintain strife;
All which I meant to praise, and yet I would;
But leave, because I cannot as I should!
-- JONSON, BEN, 1616, To John Donne.
That Done's Anniversarie was profane and full of blasphemies: that he told Mr. Done, if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something; to which he answered, that he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was. That Done, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.... He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world in some things: his verses of the "Lost Chaine" he hath by heart; and that passage of the "Calme," That dust and feathers doe not stirs, all was so quiet. Affirmeth Done to have written all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old. -- DRUMMOND, WILLIAM, 1619, Notes on Ben Jonson's Conversations.
The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purg'd by thee, the lazier seeds
Of servile imitation throwne away,
And fresh invention planted; thou didst pay
The debts of our penurious banquerout age:
. . . whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue,
Thou hast redeem'd, and opened as a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancie . . .
. . . to the awe of thy imperious wit
Our troublesome language bends, made only
With her tough thick-rib'd hoopes, to gird about
Thy gyant fancy.
-- CAREW, THOMAS, 1631? An Elegie upon the Death of Doctor Done, Works, ed.
Hazlitt, pp. 93, 94.
. . . all the softnesses,
The Shadow, Light, the Air, and Life, of Love;
The Sharpness of all Wit; ev'n bitterness
Makes Satire Sweet; all wit did God improve,
‘Twas flamed in him, ‘Twas but warm upon
His Embers; He was more; and it is Donne.
-- DANIEL, GEORGE, 1647, A Vindication of Poesy.
Would not Donne's satires, which abound with so much wit, appear more charming if he had taken care of his words, and of his numbers? But he followed Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him; and I may safely say it of this present age, that if we are not so great wits as Donne, yet, certainly, we are better poets. -- DRYDEN, JOHN, 1692, Essay on Satire, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, vol. XIII, p. 109.
If it be true that the purport of poetry should be to please, no author has written with such utter neglect of the rule. It is scarce possible for a human ear to endure the dissonance and discord of his couplets and even when his thoughts are clothed in the melody of Pope, they appear to me hardly worth the decoration. -- DRAKE, NATHAN 1798, Literary Hours, No. xxviii.
Donne had not music enough to render his broken rhyming couplets sufferable, and neither his wit, nor his pointed satire were sufficient to rescue him from that neglect which his uncouth and rugged versification speedily superinduced. -- WHITE, HENRY KIRKE, 1806, Melancholy Hours, Remains, ed. Southey, vol. II, p. 286.
Since Dryden, the metre of our poets leads to the sense: in our elder and more genuine bards, the sense, including the passion, leads to the metre. Read even Donne's satires as he meant them to be read, and as the sense and passion demand, and you will find in the lines a manly harmony. -- COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1818, Notes on Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Ashe, p. 427.
Nothing could have made Donne a poet, unless as great a change had been worked in the internal structure of his ears, as was wrought in elongating those of Midas. -- SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 1807, Specimens of the Later English Poets, vol. I, p. xxiv.
Donne was the "best good-natured man, with the worst natured Muse." A romantic and uxorious lover, he addresses the object of his real tenderness with ideas that outrage decorum. He begins his own epithalamium with most indelicate invocation to his bride. His ruggedness and whim are almost proverbially known. Yet there is a beauty of thought which at intervals rises from his chaotic imagination, like the form of Venus smiling on the waters. -- CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, An Essay on English Poetry.
Donne is the most inharmonious of our versifiers, if he can be said to have deserved such a name by lines too rugged to seem metre. Of his earlier poems, many are very licentious, the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much; the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible: it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages that we should care to read again. HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. iii, ch. v, par. 39.
Having a dumb angel, and knowing more noble poetry than he articulates. -- BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1842-63, The Book of the Poets, vol. II, p. 50.
With verses gnarl'd and knotted, hobbled on. -- LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE, 1846, Satirists.
Of stubborn thoughts a garland thought twine;
To his fair Maid brought cabalistic posies,
And sung quaint ditties of metempsychosis;
"Twists iron pokers into true love-knots,"
Coining hard words, not found in polyglots,
-- COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1849, Donne, Sketches of English Poets, Poems, vol. II, p. 295.
With vast learning, with subtile and penetrating intellect, with a fancy singularly fruitful and ingenious, he still contrived to disconnect, more or less, his learning from what was worth learning, his intellect from what was reasonable, his fancy from what was beautiful. His poems, or rather his metrical problems, are obscure in thought, rugged in versification, and full of conceits which are intended to surprise rather than to please but they still exhibit a power of intellect, both analytical and analogical, competent at once to separate the minutest and connect the remotest ideas. This power, while it might not have given his poems grace, sweetness, freshness, and melody would still, if properly directed, have made them valuable for their thoughts; but in the case of Donne it is perverted to the production of what is bizarre or unnatural, and his muse is thus as hostile to use as to beauty. The intention is, not to idealize what is true, but to display the writer's skill and wit in giving a show of reason to what is false. The effect of this on the moral character of Donne was pernicious. A subtile intellectual scepticism, which weakened will, divorced thought from action and literature from life, and made existence a puzzle and a dream, resulted from this perversion of his intellect. He found that he could wittily justify what was vicious as well as what was unnatural; and his amatory poems, accordingly, are characterized by a cold, hard, labored, intellectualized sensuality, worse than the worst impurity of his contemporaries because it has no excuse of passion for its violations of decency. -- WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1859-68, The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, p. 231.
Donne, altogether gives us the impression of a great genius ruined by a false system. He is a charioteer run away with by his own pampered steeds. He begins generally well, but long ere the close, quibbles, conceits, and the temptation of strewing off recondite learning, prove too strong for him, and he who commenced following a serene star, ends pursuing a will-o'-wisp into a bottomless morass. Compare for instance, the ingenious nonsense which abounds in the middle and the close of his "Progress of the Soul" with the dark, but magnificent stanzas which are the first in the poem. In no writings in the language is there more spilt treasure a more lavish loss of beautiful, original, and striking things than in the poems of Donne. -- GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1860, Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-Known British Poets, vol. I, p. 203.
On a superficial inspection, Donne's verses look like so many riddles. They seem to be written upon the principle of making the meaning as difficult to be found out as possible, -- of using all the resources of language, not to express thought, but to conceal it. Nothing is said in a direct, natural manner; conceit follows conceit without intermission; the most remote analogies, the most far- fetched images, the most unexpected turns, one after another, surprise and often puzzle the understanding; while things of the most opposite kinds -- the harsh and the harmonious, the graceful and the grotesque, the grave and the gay, the pious and the profane -- meet and mingle in the strangest of dances. But running through all this bewilderment, a deeper insight detects not only a vein of the most exuberant wit, but often the sunniest and most delicate fancy, and the truest tenderness and depth of feeling. -- CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. I, p. 579.
There is indeed much in Donne, in the unfolding of his moral and spiritual life which often reminds us of St. Augustine. I do not mean that noteworthy as on many accounts he was, and in the lan- guage of Carew, one of his contemporaries
"A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit."
he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same tumultuous youth, the same final deliverance from them, and then the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered, and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God's grace he had victoriously struggled. -- TRENCH, RICHARD CHENEVIX, 1868, A Household Book of English Poetry, p. 403.
The central thought of Dr. Donne is nearly sure to be just: the subordinate thoughts by means of which he unfolds it are often grotesque, and so wildly associated as to remind one of the lawlessness of a dream, wherein mere suggestion without choice or fitness rules the sequence. As some of the writers of whom I have last spoken would play with words, Dr. Donne would sport with ideas, and with the visual images or embodiments of them. Certainly in his case much knowledge reveals itself in the association of his ideas, and great facility in the management and utterance of them. True likewise, he says nothing unrelated to the main idea of the poem, but not the less certainly does the whole resemble the speech of a child of active imagination, to whom judgment as to the character of his suggestions is impossible, his taste being equally gratified with a lovely image and a brilliant absurdity: a butterfly and a shining potherd are to him similarly desirable. Whatever wild thing starts from the thicket of thought, all is worthy game to the hunting intellect of Dr. Donne, and is allowed without question of tone, keeping, or harmony. In his play with words Sir Philip Sidney kept good heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas, Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worse that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us when we find that he can write a lovely verse and even an exquisite stanza. -- MACDONALD, GEORGE, 1868, England's Antiphon, p. 114.
A pungent satirist, of terrible crudeness, a powerful poet, of a precise and intense imagination, who still preserves something of the energy and thrill of the original inspiration. But he deliberately abuses all these gifts, and succeeds with great difficulty in concocting a piece of nonsense.... Twenty times while reading him we rub our brow, and ask with astonishment, how a man could so have tormented and contorted himself, strained his style, refined on his refinement, hit upon such absurd comparisons? -- TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. I, bk. ii, ch. i, pp. 203, 204.
His reputation as a poet, great in his own day, low during the latter part of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth centuries, has latterly revived. In its days of abasement, critics spoke of his harsh and rugged versification, and his leaving nature for conceit. It seems to be now acknowledged that, amidst much bad taste, there is much real poetry, and that of a high order, in Donne. -- CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopcedia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers.
Better and truer verse none ever wrote . . .
Than thou, revered and magisterial Donne!
-- BROWNING, ROBERT, 1878, The Two Poets of Groisic.
Donne's contemporary reputation as a poet, and still more as a preacher, was immense; and a glance at his works would suffice to show that he did not deserve the contempt with which he was subsequently treated. But yet his chief interest is that he was the principal founder of a school which especially expressed and represented a certain bad taste of his day. Of his genius there can be no question; but it was perversely directed. One may almost invert Jonson's famous panegyric on Shakespeare, and say that Donne was not for all time but for an age. His natural gifts were certainly great. He possesses a real energy and fervour. He loved, and he suffered much, and he writes with a passion which is perceptible through all his artificialities. -- HALES, JOHN W., 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. i, pp. 558, 560.
We find little to admire, and nothing to love. We see that farfetched similes, extravagant metaphors, are not here occasional blemishes, but the substance. He should have given us simple images, simply expressed; for he loved and suffered much: but fashion was stronger than nature. -- WELSH, ALFRED, 1882, Development of English Literature and Language, vol. I, p. 413.
Donne's poems were first collected in 1633: they cover an extraordinary range in subject, and are throughout marked with a strange originality almost equally fascinating and repellent. It is possible that his familiarity with Italian and Spanish literatures, both at that time deeply coloured by fantastic and far-fetched thought, may have in some degree influenced him in that direction. His poems were probably written mainly during youth. There is a strange solemn passionate earnestness about them, a quality which underlies the fanciful "conceits" of all his work. -- PALGRAVE, FRANCIS T., 1889, The Treasury of Sacred Song, note, p. 333.
In him the Jacobean spirit, as opposed to the Elizabethan, is paramount. His were the first poems which protested, in their form alike and their tendency, against the pastoral sweetness of the Spenserians. Something new in English literature begins in Donne, something which proceeded, under his potent influence, to colour poetry for nearly a hundred years. The exact mode in which that influence was immediately distributed is unknown to us, or very dimly perceived. To know more about it is one of the great desiderata of literary history. The imitation of Donne's style begins so early, and becomes so general, that several critics have taken for granted that there must have been editions of his writings which have disappeared. . . . The style of Donne, like a very odd perfume, was found to cling to every one who touched it, and we observe the remarkable phenomenon of poems which had not passed through a printer's hands exercising the influence of a body of accepted classical work. In estimating the poetry of the Jacobean age, therefore, there is no writer who demands more careful study than this enigmatical and subterranean master, this veiled Isis whose utterances outweigh the oracles of all the visible gods. -- GOSSE, EDMUND, 1894, The Jacobean Poets, pp. 47, 48.
After he had taken holy orders Donne seldom threw his passions into verse; even his "Divine Poems" are, with few exceptions, of early date; the poet in Donne did not cease to exist, but his ardour, his imagination, his delight in what is strange and wonderful, his tenderness, his tears, his smiles, his erudition, his intellectual ingenuities, were all placed at the service of one whose desire was that he might die in the pulpit, or if not die, that he might take his death in the pulpit, a desire which was in fact fulfilled. . . . Donne as a poet is certainly difficult of access. He sometimes wrote best, or thought he wrote best, when his themes were wholly of the imagination. Still it is evident that Donne, the student, the recluse, the speculator on recondite problems, was also a man who adventured in pursuit of violent delights which had violent ends. . . . In whatever sunny garden, and at whatever banquet Donne sits, he discerns in air the dark Scythesman of that great picture attributed to Orcagna. An entire section of his poetry is assigned to death. -- DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1896, New Studies in Literature, pp. 90, 91, 107, 117.
As in the case of the pastoral fashion there were other currents of lyrical production, less directed by the conventionalities of the moment. Spenser aside, whose elaborated state does not lend itself readily to the shorter lyric and whose singing robes are stiff with tissue of gold, wrought work, and gems inlaid, and Shakespeare, also, whose non-dramatic Muse is dedicated to thoughtful sonnet and mournful threnody, as well as to the sprightlier melodies of love, wine, and merriment, the most important poetical influence of this decade is that of that grave and marvelous man, Dr. John Donne. I would respectfully invite the attention of those who still persist with Dr. Johnson in regarding this great poet as the founder of a certain "Metaphysical School of Poetry," a man all but contemporary with Cowley, and a writer harsh, obscure, and incomprehensible in his diction, first to an examination of facts which are within the reach of all, and, secondly, to an honest study of his works. Just as Shakespeare touched life and man at all points, and, absorbing the light of his time, gave it forth a hundredfold, so Donne, withdrawn almost wholly from the influences affecting his contemporaries, shone and glowed with a strange light all his own. . . . It seems to me that no one, excepting Shakespeare, with Sidney, Greville, and Jonson in lesser measure, has done so much to develop intellectualized emotion in the Elizabethan lyric as John Donne. -- SCHELLING, FELIX E., 1895, A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. xxi, xxii, xxiii.
There is hardly any, perhaps indeed there is not any, English author on whom it is so hard to keep the just mixture of personal appreciation and critical measure as it is on John Donne. It is almost necessary that those who do not like him should not like him at all, should be scarcely able to see how any decent and intelligent human creature can like him. It is almost as necessary that those who do like him should either like him so much as to speak unadvisedly with their lips, or else curb and restrain the expression of their love for fear that it should seem on that side idolatry. But these are not the only dangers. Donne is eminently of that kind which lends itself to sham liking,to coterie worship, to a false enthusiasm; and here is another weapon in the hands of the infidels, and another stumbling-block for the feet of the true believers.... In Donne's case the yea-nay fashion of censorship which is necessary and desirable in the case of others is quite superfluous. His faults are so gross, so open, so palpable, that they hardly require the usual amount of critical comment and condemnation. But this very peculiarity of theirs constantly obscures his beauties even to not unfit readers. They open him; they are shocked, or bored, or irritated, or puzzled by his occasional nastiness (for he is now and then simply and inexcusably nasty), his frequent involution and eccentricity, his not quite rare indulgence in extravagances which go near to silliness and so they lose the extraordinary beauties which lie beyond or among these faults. . . . For those who have experienced or who at least understand, the ups-and- downs,the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any writer like Donne. -- SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, Poems of John Donne, Introduction, vol. I, pp. xi, xxxi, xxxii.
"The Will of John Donne" is probably the wittiest and the bitterest lyric in our language. Donne's love passages and their record in verse were over before the author was of age. His wit then turned into metaphysical sermon-writing and theological polemics, and his bitterness into a despairing austerity. -- CRAWFURD, OSWALD, 1896, Lyrical Verse from Elizabeth to Victoria, p. 426.
Donne is a thoroughly original spirit and a great innovator; he is thoughtful, indirect, and strange; he nurses his fancies, lives with them, and broods over them so much that they are still modern in all their distinction and ardour, in spite of the strangeness of their apparel -- a strangeness no greater perhaps than that of some modern poets, like Browning, as the apparel of their verse will appear two hundred years hence. Ingenuity, allusiveness, the evocation of remote images and of analogies that startle the mind into a more than half acquiescence, phantoms of deep thoughts, and emotions half-sophisticated and wholly intense: these things mark the poetry of Donne. His Iyric is original and taking, but it lacks simplest thoughts; it does not sing. It is ascetic and sometimes austere; the sense of sin, the staple of contemporary tragedy, enters the lyric with Donne. He is all for terseness and meaning, and his versification accords with his thought and is equally elliptical. -- CARPENTER, FREDERIC IVES, 1897, English Lyric Poetry, 1500-1700, Introduction, p. lviii.
One of the most enigmatical and debated, alternately one of the most attractive and most repellent, figures in English literature. -- HANNAY, DAVID, 1898, The Later Renaissance, p. 220.
In one way he has partly become obsolete because he belonged so completely to the dying epoch. The scholasticism in which his mind was steeped was to become hateful and then contemptible to the rising philosophy, the literature which he had assimilated went to the dust-heaps, preachers condescended to drop their doctorial robes, downright common-sense came in with Tillotson and South in the next generation, and not only the learning but the congenial habit of thought became unintelligible. Donne's poetical creed went the same way, and if Pope and Parnell perceived that there was some genuine ore in his verses and tried to beat it into the coinage of their own day, they only spoilt it in trying to polish it. But on the other side, Donne's depth of feeling, whether tortured into short lyric or expanding into voluble rhetoric, has a charm which perhaps gains a new charm from modern sentimentalists. His morbid or "neurotic" constitution has a real affinity for latter-day pessimists. If they talk philosophy where he had to be content with scholastic theology the substance is pretty much the same. He has the characteristic love for getting pungency at any price; for dwelling upon the horrible till we cannot say whether it attracts or repels him; and can love the "intense" and supersublimated as much as if he were skilled in all the latest Esthetic canons. -- STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1899, John Donne, The National Review, vol. 34, p. 613.
[His] was the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer, he is a poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which speaks in his verse the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally, religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries; some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or for money. But he writes nothing "out of his own head," as we say; nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake. He speaks, in a letter, of "descending to print anything in verse" and it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry, or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others. He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine, he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and persons scarcley less important to him, in the building up of himself. -- SYMONS, ARTHUR, 1899, John Donne, Fortnightly Review, ns., vol. 66, p. 735.
John Donne is of interest to the student of literature chiefly because of the influence which he exerted on the poetry of the age. His verse teems with forced comparisons and analogies between things remarkable for their dissimilarity. An obscure likeness and a worthless conceit were as important to him as was the problem of existence to Hamlet. -- HALLECK, REUBEN POST 1900, History of English Literature, p. 186.
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