by Jane Belden

by Jane Belden

In an essay on John Donne, T.S. Eliot writes "With sincerity in a practical sense, poetry has little to do; the poet is responsible to a much more difficult consciousness and honesty. And it is because of this honesty, because he is so often expressing his genuine whole of tangled feelings, that Donne is, like the early Italians, like Heine, like Baudelaire, a poet of the world's literature."