Further Allusions and Debts to John Donne

Abstract

One telling indication of a poet's influence in his own time is the extent and degree to which his phrasing and imagery have permeated the imagination of his readers, so that this phrasing, this imagery, reappear in readers' comments, quoted casually or adapted to other contexts. Not all twentieth-century readers write poems in the manner of Eliot; but I do not think that they will sing to me, April is the cruellest month, Not with a bang but a whimper, the unstilled world still whirled / About the centre of the silent Word, have become common coin of the literate. In like manner, the phrasing of John Donne permeated the minds of a wide variety of readers in the first half of the seventeenth century.