They were all figments
of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all use the same terms and write
in fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and
intellectualized like Dante, sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into
this enclosed garden of sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately
and rudely, pulling up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked
thoughts, planting, as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh
invention. Where his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or
adoring, he was brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin
a poem, "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be
as resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his
Dark Lady--
"Hope not for mind in women; at their best,
Sweetness and wit they're but mummy possest."
And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none of
theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. "I did
best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject."
His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant youth, and
the poetic talent which made it turned in his later years to express
itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is no essential
distinction between the two halves of his work.
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