Uniquely, I think, among the metaphysicals, Donne gave expression in his career to the whole breadth of human experience, from sexual joy to suicidal despair, footnote-heavy learning to simple emotion, curt sarcasm to pure worship. Even restricting oneself to his very best poems one finds a remarkable range. Whatever personal sea-change occurred between "To his mistress, going to Bed," and "Hymn to God my God in my Sicknesse," both poems exhibit not just the instinct for apt and memorable image and line, but an electric immediacy of occasion. These are not cute or cunning devices; the poet was all the way inside whatever experience he had when he was moved to write-- *and still,* he wrote. Ideally, to get a full appreciation for Donne (and not just for that), one should read also several of his sermons, and the Devotions, the book he wrote during and after the illness that almost killed him, from which comes the famous meditation posing the question of "for whom the bell tolls." But though I believe his deep capacity for both joy and doubt are what made him a gifted preacher (and indeed theologian) as well as poet, it is first and last as a poet that Donne will remain canonical. He may have suspected this. In his later years, when he was the illustrious Doctor John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, he distanced himself from many of the poems of his youth, saying they were written by "Jack Donne;" but he never pulled a Kafka, trying to have them destroyed. If he had written only "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," this alone would have been enough to keep him anthologized as long as the language is read. It does not matter how many times I have read it; whenever I come upon the last few lines with their amazing figure for love and loyalty, I feel that sure sign of poetry Nabokov, Housman and Dickinson all knew: the tingle of music sparking between the skin and the soul. Read Donne carefully, slowly, and aloud. No poet has more fully devoted his intellect to the service of his muse, nor, finally, his music to the glory of his God. ( )