No More Learning

A metaphysical poet in the full sense of the word is a poet who finds
his inspiration in learning; not in the world as his own and common
sense reveal it, but in the world as science and philosophy report of
it. The two greatest metaphysical poets of Europe are Lucretius and
Dante. What the philosophy of Epicurus was to Lucretius, that of
Thomas Aquinas was to Dante. Their poetry is the product of their
learning, transfigured by the imagination, and it is not to be
understood without some study of their thought and knowledge.

Donne is not a metaphysical poet of the compass of Lucretius and
Dante. He sets forth in his poetry no ordered system of the universe.
The ordered system which Dante had set forth was breaking in pieces
while Donne lived, under the criticism of Copernicus, Galileo, and
others, and no poet was so conscious as Donne of the effect on
the imagination of that disintegration. In the two _Anniversaries_
mystical religion is made an escape from scientific scepticism.
Moreover, Donne's use of metaphysics is often frivolous and flippant,
at best simply poetical. But he is a learned poet, and he is a
philosophical poet, and without some attention to the philosophy
and science underlying his conceits and his graver thought it is
impossible to understand or appreciate either aright. Failure to do so
has led occasionally to the corruption of his text.

[Sidenote: _Donne's Learning. _]

Walton tells us that Donne's learning, in his eleventh year when he
went to Oxford, 'made one then give this censure of him, "That this
age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula; of whom story says that
he was rather born than made wise by study. "' 'In the most unsettled
days of his youth', the same authority reports, 'his bed was not able
to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no
common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all
which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after
it. ' 'He left the resultances of 1,400 authors, most of them abridged
and analysed with his own hand.
' The lists of authors prefixed to
his prose treatises and the allusions and definite references in the
sermons corroborate Walton's statement regarding the range of Donne's
theological and controversial reading.

[Sidenote: _Classical Literature. _]

Confining attention here to Donne's poetry, and the spontaneous
evidence of learning which it affords, one would gather that his
reading was less literary and poetic in character than was Milton's
during the years spent at Horton. It is clear that he knew the
classical poets, but there are few specific allusions. Ovid, Horace,
and Juvenal one can trace, not any other with certainty, nor in his
sermons do references to Virgil, Horace, or other poets abound.

[Sidenote: _Italian. _]

Like Milton, Donne had doubtless read the Italian romances. One
reference to Angelica and an incident in the _Orlando Furioso_
occur in the _Satyres_, and from the same source as well as from an
unpublished letter we learn that he had read Dante. Aretino is the
only other Italian to whom he makes explicit reference.

[Sidenote: _French. _]

One of Regnier's satires opens in a manner resembling the fourth of
Donne's, and in a letter written from France apparently in 1612 he
refers to 'a book of French Satires', which Mr. Gosse conjectures to
be Regnier's. The resemblance may be accidental, for Donne's _Satyres_
were written before the publication of Regnier's (1608, 1613), and
Donne makes no explicit mention of him or any other French poet.
We learn, however, from his letters that he had read Montaigne and
Rabelais; and it is improbable that he did not share the general
interest of his contemporaries in the poetry of the _Pleiade_. The
one poet to whom recent criticism has pointed as the inspiration
of Donne's metaphysical verse is the Protestant poet Du Bartas. Mr.