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Links | Bibliography | Author List (1572–1631)
Donne's verse fuses flesh and spirit through metaphysical conceits that create fascinating connections between apparently unrelated topics. In Donne's erotic lyrics, sex excites spiritual ecstasy along with hot lust and seductive wit. Similarly, Donne's religious poems express his relation with God not as an intellectual construct but as an emotional need, articulated in intimate and even erotic language. Later ages did not always appreciate either Donne's sensuality or his intellectual extravagance; remarkably, none of his poems were included in the most important nineteenth-century anthology of poetry, Palgraves's Golden Treasury. Donne's fame was revived early in the twentieth century, when modernist poets, especially T. S. Eliot, took inspiration from Donne's complex mixture of immediacy and artifice, passion and subtle thought. Top | Links | Bibliography | Author List
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John Donne wrote
some of the most passionate love poems and most moving religious verse in
the English language. Even his contemporaries wondered how one mind could
express itself in such different modes. Eliciting a portrait of the artist
as a split personality, Donne's letters mention the melancholic lover "Jack
Donne," succeeded by the Anglican priest "Doctor Donne." Izaak Walton's Life
of Donne (1640) portrays an earnest aspiring clergyman who wrote love poetry
to his wife. Yet Donne actually wrote most of his poetry—both the love
lyrics and the Holy Sonnets—before he entered the ministry at forty-three.
An ambitious, talented, and handsome young man, Donne struggled to attain
secular patronage; later he resigned himself to life in the church and, after
his wife's death, came to terms with his own mortality.