Clay's Commonplace Book
“Donne’s metaphysical style, with its bare scientific allusions and its insistently dialectical manner, seems almost completely at odds with the richly evocative language and the delight in natural creation that we find in Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Where their poetry expands imaginatively to take in great tracts of experience, Donne works tortuously towards a single, barely accessible point: his solution of a baffling intellectual problem.”
From James Winny
A Preface to Donne