The Language of the Donne Tradition

In his book The Donne Tradition, published in 1930, George Williamson’s central question was, “What do we owe to the Donne tradition as an inheritance of genuinely poetic value?” The question involves both description and evaluation: what exactly is the tradition and what do we mean by genuine poetic value in it? Mr. Williamson and many others have been impressed by the characteristic which they call “direct sensuous apprehension of thought”; they find this quality valuable in our own time and present in the poetry of Donne, and therefore they stress its importance in tradition. But I think that an examination of at least one basic part of the tradition, its medium in language, suggests a more abstract, a more relational and less sensuous emphasis as characteristic of Donne’s poetry and Donne’s kind of poetry.

The consideration of an artistic tradition requires consideration of proportion and of continuity, and both proportion and continuity are observable in the poet’s choice of materials, the sound patterns, words, and sentence structures of the language which embodies his ideas and attitudes. The recognition of such materials does not in itself establish knowledge of the whole poem or the whole style, but may be a necessary part of such knowledge, as the medium is a necessary part of the art.