Lives and literary contexts

Abstract

The study of a particular poet, or even of a group of poets, in isolation from their predecessors and contemporaries is always dangerous. It results in the impression that the individual poet invented his or her style without reference to the past, and used ideas without discussing them with friends and fellow writers. Donne especially inherited a tradition and transformed it, but he did so in the spirit of his age, which was very different from that of Marvell who died nearly half a century after the older poet. It is interesting to note how long the Metaphysical tradition lasted: over a century separates the birth of John Donne (1572) from the death of Andrew Marvell (1678).