John Donne

John Donne (London, 1572 - 1631) was an English poet, scholar and clergyman, regarded as the leading figure of the metaphysical poets. He lived through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, and wrote in English. His work brought to English poetry an intellectual, ironic and daring voice that set him apart from the smoother conventions of Elizabethan verse.

He was born into a Catholic recusant family at a time when practising that faith was illegal in England. His father died when he was four, and his mother soon remarried. Donne studied at Oxford and then Cambridge but took no degree, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy. He then trained in law in London, spending much of his inheritance on books, travel and pleasure. He fought against Spain in expeditions of the 1590s and, by about the age of twenty-five, had entered the service of Thomas Egerton, which opened the way to court life.

His early poems are amorous, satirical and elegiac, marked by a sensual realism and intricate metaphors. His first biographer, Izaak Walton, describes him as a young libertine, though scholars suspect that the image may owe something to the older, ordained Donne, who had reasons to separate his past from his present.

A secret marriage to Anne More, Egerton's niece, in 1601 ended his hopes of a public career. He was dismissed and briefly imprisoned, and for years the family lived in real hardship. Anne bore twelve children, and only seven survived to adulthood. Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law in 1609 and received his wife's dowry. He sat in Parliament in 1601 and again in 1614. Between 1610 and 1611 he wrote two anti-Catholic prose works, Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius His Conclave, hoping to win the favour of King James. The king was pleased, but offered him only church posts. Donne resisted for a long time before he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1615.

After Anne died in 1617, his poetry grew more sombre and devotional, as in the poems known as the Holy Sonnets. As a preacher he was admired for his eloquence, and around 160 of his sermons survive. In 1621 he became Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, a post he held until his death. His last sermon, Death's Duell, preached in February 1631, was taken by his listeners as a foreshadowing of his own funeral. He died the following month and was buried in the cathedral.

Donne is above all a master of the conceit, a metaphor that yokes two distant things together and often stretches across an entire poem. Rejecting the stock Petrarchan images of his contemporaries, he sought unexpected comparisons. His lines often open abruptly, are full of paradox, and move with the rhythms of speech, through tense and tightly knotted syntax.

His legacy lies in the surprise of his images and the direct voice of his poems, which readers still count among the high points of English verse.