It is all of a piece.
The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion,
analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion. His devotional poems,
though they probe and question, are none the less never sermons, but
rather confessions or prayers. His intense individuality, eager always,
as his best critic has said, "to find a North-West passage of his
own,"[2] pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner
of love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited
new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into poetry
of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. Simplicity
indeed would have been for him an affectation; his elaborateness is not
like that of his followers, constructed painfully in a vicious desire to
compass the unexpected, but the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile
and ingenious mind. The curiosity, the desire for truth, the search
after minute and detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He
bears the spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or
Newton, or Descartes.
[Footnote 2: Prof. Grierson in _Cambridge History of English
Literature_.]
The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new
school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne's
by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary
revolution imperative.
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