The points which I hope to establish against Professor Gardner's account of Donne's love-poems (The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), in text and dating, may not seem very important; but to accept her ruling is to let an old controversy go by default. The current view has been taken for granted often enough, indeed for much too long, but only now is it consolidated by a claim to scientific proof; and the proof needs to be recognised as radically inadequate.

In the twenties, when I was young, it was a usual assumption among critics that Donne was somehow an advanced thinker, or at any rate an interesting one, who cast an independent eye on both church and state. Thus F. W. Payne said in his book on Donne (1926):

Everyone in the Eng. Lit. business under forty is deliciously outraged on hearing this sentence, but I still think that these authors both did have piercing insight. It was fair to get tired of critics like Payne because they did not say what Donne had seen, but Donne's use of astronomy gives a definite example. Professor Marjorie Nicolson could still say as late as 1935 {Studies in Philology):