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Interesting as he was as a playwright, influential as he was as a critic, yet it is his poetry, finally, that will survive. In five lines of the poem Whispers of Immortality he really said more about Donne than in all of his famous essay on the metaphysical poets:
Expert beyond experience, He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone.
It could be his own epitaph.