The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor
which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in
that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite
in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and
wilful difficultness in language and versification. Against these
ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers
invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so
they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In
the treatment of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted
ideas which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and
they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete statement.
In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had
sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back
the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all
the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality. It is
never intimate and never profound, but it has point and wit, and it
appeals with confidence to the balanced judgment which men who distrust
emotion and have no patience with subtleties intellectual, emotional, or
merely verbal, have in common.
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