Love Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

A quiet flex disguised as a confession: "I still read Donne" isn’t just a reading habit, it’s a staking-out of lineage. Carol Ann Duffy, a poet who has spent her career prying open the politics of intimacy, reaches back to John Donne as if to say the tradition is not a museum piece. That "still" does a lot of work. It acknowledges the cultural drift away from dense metaphysical poetry, and it pushes back: Donne remains usable, not merely admirable.

The choice to specify "particularly his love poems" is the real tell. Donne’s love lyrics are famously brainy, erotic, argumentative. They don’t float on feeling; they negotiate it, seduce with logic, turn desire into a kind of rhetoric. Duffy’s poetry often operates in that same register: intimate speech that knows it’s being overheard, a voice that can be tender and tactical at once. By singling out the love poems, she’s aligning herself with a version of love that’s messy, embodied, and cunning - not the sanitized romance of greeting cards, but the kind that can hold contradiction without blinking.

There’s subtext, too, about permission. Donne has long been treated as a male canonical giant; Duffy’s "I still read" can sound like reclaiming access, insisting that the canon’s pleasures aren’t reserved for the people it originally centered. It’s also a signal to younger writers: craft and heat can coexist, and the past can be raided without reverence.