The poetry of John Donne, filled as it is with references to the ruins of time, enabled a sequence of literary critics to position themselves as modern, rather than as nostalgic commentators on a seventeenth-century author. This chapter is intended to show how criticism from Samuel Johnson to T. S. Eliot allowed Donne’s poetry to be viewed as an “origin” of the modern, historically considered. The early section identifies the readings of neo-classical, Romantic and Modernist critical positions that foreground Donne’s sensibility as either problematic or exemplary. All these readings are not merely critical positions but “discourses of Donne” that are haunted by elements in the poet’s sensibility that are difficult, if not impossible, to assimilate to modernity itself. In the modern critical tradition, modernity falls into ruin, just as the critic seeks to demonstrate its centrality to any credible reading of Donne. A reading of Donne’s early poem, “A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucie’s Day,” attempts to reinforce the idea that Donne contributed to literary history in effectively challenging how a series of critics appropriated modernity and in showing how poetry can be renewed through an ongoing interpretive present. The conclusion argues that Donne’s poetry enabled critics to view literature through the double lens of aesthetics and hermeneutics, broadly considered.