SOURCE: "Jonson, Donne, and Their Successors," in English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660, Clarendon Press, 1945, pp. 104-69.

In the following excerpt, Bush surveys the work of several metaphysical poets who wrote as the revolutionary crisis in England developed. He notes their religious affiliations and the ways in which those beliefs influenced their poetry.

… No one turned so completely away from human to divine love as the author of The Temple (1633).¹ Herbert may not electrify the nerves and the imagination so often or so startlingly as Donne, but, instead of Donne's fevered preoccupation with death, Herbert has a far more truly religious preoccupation with everyday fulfilment of the divine will here and now. The one thrills the non-religious reader, the other may not, very much. If a prime essential of metaphysical poetry is inner tension, no writer has more than the man whose manuscript was 'a picture...