John Donne

Who Was John Donne?

John Donne was the greatest of the metaphysical poets and one of the most important prose writers of the English Renaissance — a man whose remarkable life trajectory, from ambitious Catholic courtier to Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the most celebrated preacher in England, produced two distinct bodies of work that are more continuous than they appear. Born in London in 1572 to a devout Catholic family, he was educated at Oxford and possibly Cambridge, studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, and embarked on a career at court that was destroyed by his secret marriage to Ann More in 1601 — a marriage that cost him his position, landed him briefly in prison, and produced twelve children before Ann’s death in 1617.

The poetry of his early career — the Songs and Sonnets, the Elegies, the Satires — is the most intellectually demanding and most emotionally intense love poetry in the English language. The poetry of his later career — the Holy Sonnets, the Divine Poems, the hymns — brings the same intensity and the same metaphysical wit to the relationship between the soul and God. His sermons, preached at St. Paul’s to congregations of thousands, are among the greatest prose works of the seventeenth century.

Donne is significant for TLA because his work demonstrates that genuine intellectual engagement and genuine devotion are not competitors but partners — that the same mind that wrote “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love” could write “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” and that both are the expression of the same hunger for a love that is finally adequate to the self that seeks it.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Songs and Sonnets — c. 1590–1617, pub. 1633
• Holy Sonnets — c. 1609–1617, pub. 1633
• Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions — 1624
• Sermons — 1640, 1649, 1660 — posthumous collections
• Death's Duel — 1632 — his final sermon