Donne’s mind was cacophonous. His relentless imagination was his single most constant feature; he wrote about his ‘worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning’. In his darker moments, it tortured him. His mind had ceaselessness built into it. It was to be, throughout his life, a site of new images, new theology, new doubts: even those who disliked his work acknowledged that he was a writer who had erupted through the old into the new.
