Donne’s Confusion

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>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. Admired in his lifetime, he went out of fashion for two centuries before he was returned to the canon by the revolution of modernism and particularly the influence of T. S. Eliot. In his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot argued that it was exactly Donne’s difficulty and strangeness that made him great. The intellectual restlessness and addiction to metaphor that made him a great love poet are just as evident in his religious verse and his sermons. His wit is a corrosive element; by finding aggressively new ways to think and write about every subject, he raises the suspicion that there are no stable realities. Maybe language doesn’t just describe our world but creates it.</jats:p>