Katherine Philips's Donnean poems of love and friendship, which are integral to her sophisticated, innovative, and largely unrecognized poetics, have given rise to a number of critical myths. Scholars claim that in those verses that invoke the love lyrics of John Donne, Philips reveals herself to be (unappealingly) royalist in her politics and conservative in her social and professional loyalties. They argue that her Donnean marriage poems lack genuine feeling, and that the true content of her Donnean friendship poems is lesbian passion. They assume that Philips's poetry is an authentic report of autobiographical emotion, whether political or amorous. They claim that Philips manifests both internal ambivalence (in the face of competing political, social, and sexual loyalties) and external defensiveness (against imposed cultural barriers), and that her Donnean poems are correspondingly either conflicted or strategic. And they insist that Philips used literary figures such as Donne not only to signal covertly her political loyalties, as many writers did in the 1650s, but to screen her professional ambition and private sexuality.