Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though it was used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the fate of its kind.  Dante’s love for Beatrice, Petrarch’s for Laura, the gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his Stella became the models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes.  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.  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.]