Two poets are explored in depth: Dante and John Donne. Boersma achieves this almost incredible task by bringing to his sources a remarkable intellectual and imaginative sympathy; he is not uncritical, but his criticisms are based on patient and learned understanding. (The footnotes, which often creep up the page, make clear the breadth of his research.) Several times Boersma engages in comparison between apparently sharply contrasting figures—Aquinas and Palamas, Symeon the New Theologian and John