BOOKS - SOUL MUSIC

John Donne and the purpose of poetry.

- ADAM KIRSCH

One way to chart the development of English poetry over the past four hundred years is to look at the fluctuating reputation of John Donne. A courtier and priest who was born in 1572 and lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare, Donne was highly regarded as a poet in his lifetime, even though he never published a book of poems. The large number of surviving handwritten copies of his work shows that it was eagerly shared by connoisseurs, and the first printed editions appeared soon after his death, in 1631. When his friend Ben Jonson, another leading poet of the age, came to praise Donne in verse, the quality he singled out was his intellect: “Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse,/Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse.” Jonson might have complained about his friend’s handling of meter—“Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,” he reportedly said—but, in early-seventeenth-century poetry, knottiness and braininess were more admired than smoothness and musicality.

By the time Samuel Johnson came to write his “Lives of the Poets,” in 1779-81, tastes had changed. In a neoclassical era, ideas still had a place in poetry, but they were supposed to be familiar ones, dignified by harmonious verse—“What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,” in the words of Alexander Pope, the master of the rhyming couplet. By this standard, Donne’s ideas looked weird.