dude, from what i remember of donne he was always writing poems and eulogies about unpleasant shit. i can't even guess a specific poem about mortality, half of them were.
which i guess since there's nobody from that period but shakespeare that makes it into your college anthology of brit lit, writing was still more or less shit. mannerist/metaphysical poetry=2 allegories, brutally formulaic. but again, writing remained shit until george eliot or sam c. and milton was shit but once you're in the cannon it's impossible to yank crap.
but burg is not dead, thankfully.

many of us have purchased norton's anthology and if you're actually buying individual donne books rapaciously it's fair to say tenured english professors would find you weird. we can all get into a circle-jerk of erudition, but these days i'm content to point to the metrics of "scoreboard"

i'm saying bornyo's correct in positing the issue of the writer/subject. think about caesar's gallic commentaries and how there's a natural issue of accurately observing something from a position of outsider with natural biases. you have to make sense of an unfamiliar culture and you start into greedy revisionism, lumping things together as neatly as possible. which ends up totally out of whack compared to what we now know about the gauls. brits in pith helmets writing about africa, etc. none of it's truly reliable.