Commentators followed Samuel Johnson in dismissing his work as no more than frigidly ingenious and metrically uncouth. Some scribbled notes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Charles Lamb's copy of Donne's poems make a testimony of admiration rare in the early nineteenth century. Robert Browning became a known (and wondered-at) enthusiast of Donne, but it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Donne's poetry was eagerly taken up by a growing band of avant-garde readers and writers. His prose remained largely unnoticed until 1919.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century Donne's poetry was decisively rehabilitated. Its extraordinary appeal to modern readers throws light on the Modernist movement itself, as on our intuitive response to our own times. Donne may no longer be the cult figure he became in the 1920s and 1930s, when T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats among others discovered in his poetry the peculiar fusion of intellect and passion, and the alert contemporariness, which they aspired to in their own art. He is not a poet for all tastes and times, yet for many readers Donne remains what Ben Jonson judged him: "the first poet in the world in some things." His poems continue to engage the attention and challenge the experience of readers who come to him afresh.
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