The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased." (p. 97, English Literary Criticism)
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,How little that which thou deniest me is;It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,And in this fiea our two bloods mingled be.Thou know'st that this cannot be saidA sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;Yet this enjoys before it woo,And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;And this, alas! is more than we would do. (p. 54 Poems of John Donne Vol. 1)
"A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."