Delighted Piety

“From what has been said it will be clear that no one can point to a moment at which poetry began to be Metaphysical nor to a poet who made it so; but of all poets perhaps Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas (1544-90) comes nearest to that position. He was a Huguenot and all his important works are religious: the Judith (1573), the Sepmaine, in its seven Jours (1578), and the Seconde Sepmaine (1584) in which only four Jours are completed but each Jour is divided into four parts running to seven hundred-odd lines each. Any idea of austerity or pious drudgery which this account may arouse must be banished from the mind at once. He was a Gascon as well as a Calvinist; a literary d’Artagnan who would fight the French language, and the whole range of human knowledge, single handed: a man of delighted piety, of vivid, darting, uncontrollable imagination” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, pp. 541-542).