The Cambridge Companion to John Donne

Even after four centuries, Donne's love poetry strikes us as fresh and immediate, with its urgent rhythms, its irregular, frequent stresses communicating the sense that passion cannot be contained within regular iambic feet. He insists that, unlike poets who ''have no Mistresse but their Muse'' (''Loves growth,'' 12), he is describing love as it really is. Yet, lines or even poems remain uncertain, endlessly intriguing, like puzzles where a piece seems missing, or where there's a surplus. We try to stabilize his elusive meanings, much as he sought to capture that most unsettling and mysterious experience of human life: love.

The voice is usually male, though a few adopt a female voice. To the extent that men and women experience desire differently, Donne expresses a distinctly male perspective. He writes as if discovering a new emotional world of desire, one whose terrain has never before been explored. Yet women as well as men recognize it at once - most of us have been there, or hope to be. Donne philosophizes about love, trying to define it, but even when he soars, he brings love's philosophy down to earth, grounding it in concrete (if imagined) material experience that prompts him to revise conventional wisdom, and even sometimes his own pronouncements.