John Donne in Context

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"John Donne produced some of the finest writing in any language about the pleasures and mysteries of love and religion. His restless imagination and voracious intellect invested his poetry and prose with an unprecedented dramatic energy and metaphoric intensity. His work is formally inventive, aggressively pushing against the very generic boundaries it enters. Even commonplace sentiments are rendered breathtakingly vivid and witty when filtered through Donne's singular intelligence. Yet wit and intelligence sometimes come at a cost. Donne can be difficult, deliberately difficult. Even his friends and contemporaries sometimes had trouble understanding his works. Ben Jonson, the Renaissance dramatist and poet, thought "That Donne himself, for not being understood, would perish.""--