At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Donne's poems expressed a strong and independent spirit. For all their indebtedness to literary traditions and conventions, they took a sceptical stance toward many received ideas and seemed written in a 'new made Idiome'. The importance of his innovation was recognized by Thomas Carew, who praised Donne as the monarch of wit who 'purg'd' 'The Muses garden', threw away 'the lazie seeds / Of Servile imitation ... And fresh invention planted'.

Part of Donne's freshness comes from his intense analysis of important aspects of human experience - the desire for love, the desire to be purged of imperfection or sinfulness, and the longing to defeat mortality. He explores erotic love and human spirituality and the relation between them. Because his poetry speaks to needs and desires that seem to persist despite cultural and historical differences, Donne is accessible, compelling, and engaging. But his poetry is also difficult and complicated. Individual poems refuse to yield a single, unequivocal meaning, and his poetry exhibits considerable variety, defying readers' attempts to reduce it to a neat order.