Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of view.

Seventeenth century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism.

To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson.

Both poets are salutary in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought and melodious facility in writing.

They are the corrective of lazy thinking and lazy composition.
Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though it was used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the fate of its kind.