John Donne

English poet

• Born: Between January 24 and June 19, 1572
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 31, 1631
• Place of death: London, England

Capturing the restless, questioning spirit of the early seventeenth century, Donne established the Metaphysical poetic style—witty, colloquial, and dramatic—in love poetry that was both devotional and erotic.

Early Life

The early life of John Donne (DUHN) set the stage for a lifelong tension that is reflected in his poetry: On the one hand, he carefully cultivated the skills necessary for political success as a courtier; on the other, he embraced a religion and entered into an imprudent marriage that impeded his political career. Donne was born in 1572, the son of John Donne, a successful London merchant and member of the Ironmongers’ Company, and Elizabeth, the daughter of epigrammatist John Heywood, and the great-niece of the martyred Sir Thomas More. Consequently trained in the Catholic faith, Donne learned early of the dangers to Catholics in Anglican Elizabethan England. Two of his uncles were Jesuits, one of whom headed a clandestine mission in England and was imprisoned, sentenced to death, and exiled. In addition, Donne’s brother Henry died of plague in Newgate Prison in 1593, having been arrested for harboring a seminary priest.

Being Catholic, Donne could not be granted a university or law degree, even though he matriculated at Hart Hall, Oxford, in 1584 and was probably at Cambridge in 1588-1589. After traveling abroad (probably from 1589 to 1591), Donne entered Thavies Inn in 1591 and spent 1592 to 1594 at Lincoln’s Inn, studying law, the classics, divinity, and perhaps medicine. During this time, Donne lived the life of a young man about town, frequently attending plays and cultivating the persona of a witty, cynical rake. In 1596-1597, he sailed with the English expeditions to Cádiz and the Azores under Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Ralegh , thus aligning himself with energetic and aspiring but doomed political forces (Raleigh was later imprisoned and Essex beheaded).

Donne’s poetry of the 1590’s communicates a sense of daring rebellion, restless talent, and spiritual exploration. Defying Elizabethan literary tradition, Donne wrote several Ovidian elegies. The elegies’ harsh realism, especially regarding sexual relationships, is a reaction against Golden Age idealism; their immediacy of situation and dominant, ironic speaking voice reflect the theater’s influence on Donne as well as his powers of self-dramatization as a “forward wit.”

In addition to challenging literary tradition, Donne questions religious authority, especially in his third satire. Again, Donne’s compelling speaking presence dictates the poem’s meter—so unlike mellifluous Elizabethan verse with its patterned “flowers of rhetoric”—and his twisted, complex syntax mirrors the convoluted theological issues being explored. Donne urges readers to “doubt wisely” while pursuing a vigilant intellectual quest for personified Truth, which stands “on a huge hill,/ Cragged, and steep… and he that will/ Reach her, about must, and about must go.”

Even his frankly amatory verses, written approximately between 1590 and 1617 and published posthumously as Songs and Sonnets in Poems, by J. D.: With Elegies on the Authors Death (1633, 1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654, 1669) are touched by Donne’s searching religious sensibility. While frequently interpreted as a typically Metaphysical “forcible yoking together” of sacred and profane opposites, Donne’s technique derives from an incredible flexibility of mind that balances the physical and spiritual simultaneously. For example, “The Ecstasy,” with its steady movement from body to soul to body, can be interpreted both as a sophisticated verbal seduction, soon to be translated into the language of the body, and as a reverent celebration of the transcendent unity experienced by spiritual lovers.

Even “The Flea,” typically viewed as one of Donne’s wittiest seduction poems, draws on religious imagery to create Christian undercurrents. The poem’s recurring wordplay on life and death is not merely a bawdy pun; the Eucharistic implications of drinking blood and the Crucifixion echoes suggested by the purpled nail that has killed the flea both point to the body’s importance in Christ’s life-giving sacrifice as well as in sexual intercourse.

Life’s Work

In many ways, Donne’s life’s work was searching for work, for a position suited to a person of his tremendous intelligence and talent. His elegies, satires, songs, and sonnets were not published during his lifetime but circulated instead in handwritten manuscript, primarily because the radical style, tones, and themes of these poems might have endangered Donne’s chances for political advancement. Donne’s prospects seemed promising in 1597-1598, when he was appointed secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of England; in 1601, Donne also served as a member of Parliament in the final gathering of that body under Queen Elizabeth I.

In December of 1601, however, Donne secretly married Anne More, the seventeen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Anne’s father, Sir George More, had Donne imprisoned and then dismissed from Egerton’s service, which essentially ruined the young man’s career. Despite the devastating effects of the marriage, the sincere love Donne shared with Anne seems remarkable in an age of arranged marriages, and Donne’s powers to express the many facets of the love experience, particularly the mutually sustaining love of equals, are phenomenal.

Poems such as “The Canonization” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” usually assumed to portray John and Anne’s love, again combine the physical and the spiritual and demonstrate the force of Donne’s dramatic imagination. “The Canonization” begins abruptly with the command, “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” as though the speaker is reacting to another’s words. Even as he celebrates the mystery and uniqueness of his love, the speaker comments on its potentially destructive nature by alluding to the phoenix, which must die before rising anew from its ashes, and by punning, “We can die by it, if not live by love,/ And if unfit for tombs and hearse/ Our legend be, it will be fit for verse.”

Similarly, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” dramatizes a scene of the lovers parting and distinguishes between “Dull sublunary lovers’ love/ (Whose soul is sense)” and lovers like the speaker: Refined and spiritual, the souls of such lovers undergo not “A breach, but an expansion,/ Like gold to aery thinness beat,” suggesting a painful process of purification. Donne’s use of religious imagery to describe his love affairs implies that he perceived and valued the mystical potential of human love as well as its physical pleasures.

The early years of Donne’s marriage were characterized by frequent moves and unsuccessful requests for employment. He was denied a position in the queen’s household and later denied secretaryships in Ireland, with the Virginia Company, and with the state. During these disillusioning years of the early seventeenth century, Donne wrote Biathanatos (pb. 1646), a treatise challenging “right reason’s” condemnation of suicide. Donne used his literary talent in his attempts to secure a place; from 1606 to 1610, he assisted Thomas Morton (later dean of Gloucester) by producing the anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Ignatius His Conclave (1611). In 1607, Morton urged Donne to take holy orders, but Donne pleaded unworthiness. Although he had converted to an uneasy Anglicanism sometime in the 1590’s, Donne was probably clinging tenaciously to a hope for political preferment and considered the Church only a last resort for advancement.

From 1610 onward, Donne’s career outlook began to brighten, though not, perhaps, in the manner he had hoped. He received an honorary M.A. from Oxford in 1610; in 1611, he accompanied Sir Robert Drury to the Continent, and upon his return in 1612, Donne moved with his large family to a house in Drury Lane, on the Drury estate. He published his first book of verse, An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary (1611), followed a year later by Of the Progress of the Soule: The Second Anniversary (1612). Known collectively as the Anniversaries, these companion poems are formal funeral elegies commemorating the death of Drury’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth (whom Donne, incidentally, had never met). Symbolizing innocence, vitality, and virtue, Elizabeth takes with her all order and harmony, leaving the earth in a chaotic state of sin, corruption, and death. The first Anniversary is usually said to reflect Jacobean melancholy, that early seventeenth century questioning of the once-stable universal hierarchy; contemporary economic, political, theological, and scientific thought is summarized in Donne’s famous line, “new philosophy calls all in doubt.”

Although only a satellite of the court, Donne maintained friendships and exchanged verse letters with an influential group of courtiers, politicians, poets, and clergy. In 1613, for example, he paid visits to Sir Henry Goodyer and Sir Edward Herbert (whose brother George was to become a Metaphysical poet and whose mother, Magdalen, was one of Donne’s patronesses). This visit occasioned the poem “Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward,” which reveals Donne’s concern with vocation and his ultimate willingness to imitate Christ’s sacrifice. In 1615, Donne was finally ordained as a priest at Saint Paul’s Cathedral and received an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge at King James’s command.

Two years later, Anne Donne died, having borne twelve children (five of whom predeceased Donne). Ironically, Donne’s public stature and responsibilities increased after Anne’s death; for the next fifteen years, he preached frequently to the court and various nobles, demonstrating great intellectual and dramatic talent, while also serving as reader in divinity at Lincoln’s Inn. He traveled to Germany as chaplain with the embassy of James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, in 1619-1620 and was installed as the dean of Saint Paul’s in 1621. Throughout the 1620’s, Donne heard cases in ecclesiastical courts and the Court of Delegates and served as a justice of the peace and as the governor of the Charterhouse School.

During a severe illness in 1623, Donne produced several prayers and devotional poems, which were published the next year as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). One such poem, “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness,” reveals Donne’s preoccupation with the essentials of Protestant drama—sin, death, faith, resurrection—and his keen introspective ability. Using, as usual, striking conceits (complex intellectual comparisons of seemingly dissimilar objects), Donne ingeniously compares his body to a lute, a map, and the two Adams. Donne also wrote numerous holy sonnets; many of these incorporate erotic imagery to emphasize the soul’s passionate desire for God, as evidenced in “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God” and “Show Me, Dear Christ, Thy Spouse.”

Taken ill late in 1630, Donne instinctively began to dramatize his death, preaching his own “funeral” sermon (published posthumously in 1632 as “Death’s Duel”) to the court on February 25, 1631. Sometime in February or March, he dressed in a shroud and posed for a portrait, making himself an emblem of mortality upon which to meditate. He transacted final Cathedral business on March 21, and on March 31, he died, a well-known and respected divine. He was buried on April 3, at St. Paul’s.

Significance

There survive approximately 160 of Donne’s sermons, some of which were published during his life; in 1633, the first collected edition of Donne’s verse was published. Donne’s work exerted a tremendous influence on other seventeenth century poets, including George Herbert , Richard Crashaw , Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell , and Abraham Cowley . While not a self-styled group, as were Ben Jonson’s cavalier poets, the Sons of Ben, this Metaphysical school of poets (a term coined by John Dryden and Samuel Johnson) practiced Donne’s roughly vigorous, colloquial, and wittily “conceited” style. Donne’s innovative talent popularized the use of realistic, homely imagery, a concentration of thought, and a precision of diction.

Donne’s popular reputation languished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the publication of Sir Herbert Grierson’s edition of Donne’s poetry in 1921, however, his influence was revived. Early twentieth century poets, themselves struggling to find truth and meaning in a rapidly changing world, found in Donne a kindred soul and a fitting model.

The parallel drawn by Izaak Walton in his hagiographic Life and Death of Dr. John Donne (1640) between Donne and Saint Augustine (whose lives are both neatly divided into sensual and ascetic halves) is, although to some extent encouraged by Donne himself, ultimately a false one. Unlike Saint Augustine, Donne’s two halves actually cohere comfortably in one and the same identity. Both Donne’s amatory and religious experiences are characterized by a troubled restlessness, a sense of struggle intermingled with joyous union. His poetry powerfully combines the emotional and the intellectual, fusing song, drama, argument, and theological discourse. Though artfully crafted, Donne’s poetry achieves an effect of spontaneity and psychological truth as it probes skeptically, perceptively, boldly into man’s heart and soul.

Donne’s Major Works

1610

• Pseudo-Martyr

1611

• An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary

1611

• Ignatius His Conclave

1612

• Of the Progress of the Soule: The Second Anniversary

1624

• Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

1632

• Death’s Duell

1633

• Juvenilia: Or, Certaine Paradoxes and Problemes

1633

• Poems, by J. D.: With Elegies on the Authors Death, (revised editions 1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654, 1669)

1634

• Six Sermons on Several Occasions

1640

• LXXX Sermons

1646

• Biathanatos

1649

• Fifty Sermons

1651

• Essayes in Divinity

1651

• Letters to Severall Persons of Honour

1660

• XXVI Sermons

1660

• A Collection of Letters

Bibliography

Bald, R. C. John Donne: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Corr. ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1986. Bald draws on anecdotes, poems, letters, and earlier biographies. Includes useful appendices providing information on Donne’s children, his library, his will, and other relevant documents.

Carey, John. John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. New ed. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. Carey approaches Donne from a somewhat psychoanalytic perspective, focusing on Donne’s anxiety about the permanence of human relationships, his apostasy as a major influence on his verse, and his fascination with power. Carey’s observations are, at times, outrageous, but he is frequently perceptive and always entertaining.

Edwards, David Lawrence. John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2002. A biography written by a theologian, especially good for its analyses of Donne’s sermons.

Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1932. A seminal essay in Donne’s critical history. Eliot’s work originated as a review of Grierson’s edition of the poems. Discusses the “direct sensuous apprehension of thought” and the “dissociation of sensibility.”

Gardner, Helen, ed. John Donne: The Divine Poems. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1952. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. John Donne: The Elegies and the “Songs and Sonnets.” Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965. An eminent critic of Donne, Gardner provides in these two books excellent general introductions to the love poems and the devotional poems, commentary, and detailed textual analysis of manuscript dating.

Leishman, J. B. The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne. 7th ed. London: Hutchinson, 1965. A good one-volume overview with chapters on Donne’s life, seventeenth century poetry, and analyses of Donne’s poems.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. “John Donne: Writing After the Copy of a Metaphorical God.” In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Lewalski argues that Donne relied increasingly on genres important to Protestant devotion and biblical poetics theory, instead of forms that were secular, liturgical, or meditational. Focuses on typology and the Protestant “application to the self.” Her first two sections, “Biblical Poetics” and “Ancillary Genres,” are also useful.

Martz, Louis L. “John Donne in Meditation.” In The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962. Martz argues that Donne’s poetry is modeled on formal religious meditations such as those practiced by St. Bernard and St. Ignatius of Loyola. Places Donne’s work in a religious cultural context.

Parfitt, George A. E. John Donne: A Literary Life. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1989. Focuses on Donne’s life and work between his marriage at age 30 and his ordination 15 years later.

Walton, Izaak. The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Walton’s Life and Death of Dr. John Donne is hagiography rather than biography. His facts are inaccurate, but his testimony as a contemporary of Donne is valuable.

Whalen, Robert. The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2002. An exploration of the importance of sacrament to seventeenth century British identity and of sacramental imagery and tropes in the poetry of Donne and of George Herbert. Attempts to discuss the poets in terms of a “sacramental Puritanism.”