TO HAVE read Donne was once evidence of a man's curious taste; now (though the vogue may be fading) it is a minimum requirement of civilized literary talk. We have seen the history of English poetry rewritten by critics convinced of his cardinal importance. This change was partly the effect of the reception into England of French Symbolist thought, and its assimilation to the native doctrines of Blake, Coleridge and Pater. Poets and critics were struck by the way Donne exhibits the play of an agile mind within the sensuous body of poetry, so that even his most passionate poems work by wit, abounding in argument and analogy; the poetry and the argument cannot be abstracted from each other. And this was interesting because the new aesthetic was founded on a hatred for the disembodied intellect, for abstract argument, for what the French called littérature. A series of poets, culminating in Mr. Eliot, proclaimed their affinity with Donne. They also searched the past in order to discover the moment when the blend of thought and passion that came so naturally to Donne, and with such difficulty to themselves, developed its modern inaccessibility. One answer was that this occurred during the lifetime of Milton, who helped to create the difficulties under which modern poetry labours. This very characteristic Symbolist historical myth is usually called by the name Mr. Eliot gave it, the 'dissociation of sensibility'. Mr. Eliot has altered his views on Donne and Milton, but his new opinions have been less powerful than the older. ones; and it remains true that to write of the fortunes of Donne in the past seventy years is, in effect, to write less about him than about the aesthetic preoccupations of that epoch.
Donne has been distorted to serve this myth; but it is true that earlier criticism had treated him harshly. As Ben