Critics of John Donne have marked a peculiar violence in his sensibility
not to be dissociated from the "boldness" and "daring" of his conceits.
Among readers of the divine poems in particular this intemperate
temperament has become an object of controversy. Qualities that made
Donne a love poet of sublime egotism also, for some critics, damaged his
religious verse irreparably; "The 'Holy Sonnets' and the 'Hymns,'" argues
a suspicious Douglas Bush, "are focused, like the love poems, on a particular
moment and situation, on John Donne, and the rest of life and the world
is blacked out, does not exist." Moreover, the agoraphobic playfulness and
unrelieved ingenuity so appealing in the context of human love have seemed
less suitable to the doctrines of the Christian faith. It is one thing to run
circles of wit about the straight-line orthodoxy of Petrarchan love poets,
quite another to bend the cherished corners of dogma. Poems such as "Batter
my heart" and "Show me deare Christ" may appear desperately inventive,
the work of a histrionic convert who "has to stimulate his awareness of God
by dwelling on the awfulness of God." Like other Renaissance poets whose
devotional verse has been assailed, Donne has been defended by scholars
assuming (however implicitly) that negative evaluations are directed,
whether by ignorance or design, against the religion itself. Louis Martz and
Helen Gardner, locating a tradition of formal meditation intended to
achieve sensual immediacy, interior drama, and intense emotion, have
disarmed objections by subtly disarming the poems, revealing those
idiosyncratic, "tasteless" moments in the religious verse as the respectable,

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