In terms of sound and English as a language, I put a lot on Donne. Reading Donne, especially out loud tricks the ear and mental voice into sounding like a liquid something, which is a part of English that has been nearly erased.
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He had a prosodic trick he learned from Shakespeare: to put the same word both in a stressed and unstressed position in the iambic line. Need to find my dissert to give examples.
Joanna