Donne, John c.1572-1631
English poet

He was born in London, the son of a prosperous ironmonger, and connected through his mother with Sir Thomas More. Although a Catholic, he was admitted to Hart Hall, Oxford, and later graduated at Cambridge, where his friendship with Sir Henry Wotton began. He decided to take up law and entered Lincoln's Inn in 1592. After taking part in the 2nd Earl of Essex's two expeditions to Cadiz in 1597 and the Azores in 1598 (reflected in his poems 'The Storm' and 'The Calm'), he became (1598) secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, keeper of the Great Seal. His daring works and strong personality indicated a career as notable as that of his contemporary Francis Bacon, but he was dismissed and imprisoned after his secret marriage to Egerton's niece, Anne More. Having turned Protestant, he lived in Mitcham in Surrey, but still sought favour and employment at the court. Under the direction of Thomas (later Bishop) Morton he undertook a religious polemic against Catholics. He had already written his passionate and erotic poems, Songs and Sonnets and his six Satires and his Elegies, but published no verse until 1611 when his Anniversarie appeared, a commemorative poem for Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his benefactor, Sir Robert Drury, whose house in the Strand offered hospitality to the poet when in London. A second Anniversarie followed which displayed his metaphysical genius at its best. His religious temper is seen in more lyrical form in the Divine Poems, some of which certainly date from before 1607. These, like most of his verse, were published posthumously but his pieces circulated widely among learned and aristocratic friends. How difficult his journey to the Anglican faith was may be judged from the satirical 'Progresse of the Soule' (1601). This unfinished poem is antiheretical, but also sceptical in a disturbing way. Donne's ten-year hesitation to take orders is variously explained as due to an indecision, or to a sense of unworthiness because of his profligate youth, or to his still wanting civil employment. He courted the distinguished ladies of the time, in verse letters of laboured but ingenious compliment. More injurious to his name was a poem for the marriage (regarded as scandalous) of the king's favourite, Robert Carr, to the divorced Countess of Essex. In his funeral poems, of which the first and second Anniversaries are the best, he also paid court to the great. His prose works of this period include Pseudo-Martyr (1610), which is an acute polemic against the Jesuits. More interesting is his Biothanatos, which discussed the question of suicide, which he claimed to contemplate on occasion. He decides that suicide is permissible in certain cases, a conclusion at variance with that affirmed in his third Satire, but confirmed in a letter to his friend Sir Henry Wotton. King James VI and I encouraged him to go into the Church (1614), and promoted him to the deanship of St Paul's in 1621 when he relinquished his readership at Lincoln's Inn. Several of his sermons are still extant. In this middle period of his life he accompanied Sir Robert Drury to France and Spain. In 1619 and 1620 he was in Germany, where he preached one of his most noble sermons before the exiled Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, King James's daughter. Donne's creative years fall into three periods: from 1590 to 1601, a time of action, passion and cynicism; from his marriage to his ordination in 1614, a period of anguished meditation and flattery of the great; and the period of his ministry, which includes two sonnet sequences, La Corona and Holy Sonnets, the latter containing (no. xvii) an anguished tribute to his wife, who died in 1617. Also of this period are the fine 'Hymne to God, the Father', 'To God My God, in my Sicknesse' and 'The Author's Last Going into Germany'.

Bibliography: J B Leishman,The Monarch of Wit (1951); R C Bald, John Donne: a life (1920)