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The history of John Donne's reputation is quite unusual. Despite his having been pressured into becoming an Anglican divine, he became famous for the beauty and power of his sermons. Almost none of his poetry was printed in his lifetime, and when a first collected edition, including a number of daring love poems, appeared two years after his death, his son denounced the book as a libel on the memory of a good and holy man, almost as if the poems were not Donne's. His work has always had discerning admirers, but to many readers and critics through the centuries he was, if he existed at all, an odd presence. His intellectual knottiness, his stress on poetry as speech rather than song, and his intense and irregular rhythms all required a good deal of getting used to, and there were many who could not or would not adjust their ears and minds to the wealth that his poetry contains. But a magisterial edition of his verse by H. J. C. Grierson in 1912 and an influential essay by T. S. Eliot in 1921 began a reappraisal of Donne that has led to a just recognition of his genius. And thanks to Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud, at least two phrases from Donne's writings are known to virtually everyone. Indeed, he has been so firmly fixed in the canon that it is now almost unimaginable that he has ever been anywhere else.
John Donne was born in London, most likely in early 1572. He was the third of seven children, only three of whom lived to maturity. His father, also named John Donne, was a prosperous ironmonger of Welsh descent. His mother, Elizabeth (Heywood) Donne, was the daughter of John Heywood, an author of interludes that give him a place in the development of British drama in the decades before Shakespeare. Heywood's wife, the poet's grandmother, was the granddaughter of the sister of Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and the subject of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, who had been executed by King Henry VIII for refusing to compromise the principles of his Catholic faith. After Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII's daughter, in 1570, Donne's family and all other English Catholics became subject to restrictions and outright persecution. John Heywood, in old age and ill health, was forced to recant and deny his faith, and his two sons, both Jesuit priests, were ultimately compelled to leave England.
In 1576, when John Donne was four, his father died. It was not uncommon at the time for widows, especially those with young children to raise, to remarry quickly in order to prevent governmental confiscation of their property, and within six months Donne's mother was once again a wife, this time to a Dr. Symmings, a London medical practitioner who held degrees from Oxford and the University of Bologna, and who twice served as President of the Royal College of Physicians. As a young boy, Donne was privately educated, quite possibly by the Jesuits, who would have given him a rigorous training in logic and in various scientific subjects. In 1584, when Donne was twelve, and Henry, his only brother, was eleven, the two boys were matriculated at Hart Hall, Oxford. It was not unheard of for boys so young to enter college, and there would have been a particular urgency in this instance, since their mother no doubt wished them to complete their educations before the age of sixteen, when all students were compelled to swear allegiance to the Anglican Church. After three years at Oxford, Donne transferred to the more liberal Cambridge, but, as a Catholic, he could not take a degree.
In 1591, John and Henry Donne were enrolled at Thavies Inn in London, a preparatory school for the study of law, and on May 6, 1592, John Donne was admitted to law school at Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court. He remained a student there for the next several years, but there is no evidence of his ever having taken his law degree. This period of his life, the time in which a young person traditionally weighs options and prospects and begins to take the steps that will shape a career and a pattern of life, must have been a particularly difficult one for him. In 1593, Henry Donne died of fever in Newgate Prison, where he had been sent for harboring a Catholic priest. His brother's sacrifice and death must have caused Donne great grief, and perhaps a measure of guilt as well, for failing to act with similar courage. On the other hand, given the religious doubts that characterized him for his entire adult life, he would have been hesitant, to say the least, to throw away his future prospects, and indeed his very life, on behalf of an allegiance to which he was not fully and intensely committed.
Whatever internal conflicts and struggles Donne may have undergone, we next find him as a member of a naval expedition—in what capacity it is not clear—led by the Earl of Essex against Spain in June 1596. This action, which surprised the Spaniards at Cadiz harbor and forced the sinking of heavily laden treasure ships, was a great success, but a similar expedition to the Azores in July 1597, in which Donne also took part, failed in its objective. Donne may have hoped to advance his career through the patronage of Essex, but any such wish was doomed by Essex's arrest for treason after an uprising against the queen (he would be executed in 1601). Yet Donne's service on these voyages led to his advancement through other means, since he befriended a shipmate named Thomas Egerton, who later recommended Donne to his father, with the result that Donne became private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. In October 1601, Donne's prospects were further enhanced by his election to Parliament, from a constituency controlled by Sir Thomas. Two months later, Donne radically altered the entire course of his life, when, at the age of twenty-nine, he impulsively married Ann More, the seventeen-year-old niece of Sir Thomas's late wife. Donne was dismissed from his post—a turn of events that he famously announced to his bride in a letter with the phrase "John Donne, Ann Donne, undone"—and even briefly imprisoned. He was forced to turn to the law to have the validity of his marriage upheld, and once he had succeeded in this, the young couple began a life of uncertain prospects and financial difficulties that would last for more than a decade.
Donne can hardly be said to have had a literary career in the conventional sense of the term, since only four of his poems were published in his lifetime, two of which he later disavowed. He may have planned to publish some of the satires he wrote in his twenties, but any such intent would have been canceled by the government's 1599 ban on the publication of satirical works. He seems to have made no effort to publish any of his Songs and Sonnets (the latter term denoting a short lyric poem), the collection of fifty-five love lyrics written in his twenties and thirties that is not only one of his greatest works but also one of the greatest books of love poetry in the language. The 1590s in England saw a craze for sonnet sequences. Despite the (sometimes labored) cleverness that characterized the writing, those works tended to circulate the same handful of rather simplistic themes and emotional stances, such as the lover's outpouring of grief over his lady's failure to reciprocate his passion, or the extravagant praise of the beauty and allure of the beloved (this latter category was definitively satirized by Shakespeare in his famous sonnet "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun"). Some of Donne's lyrics are admittedly within these narrow confines: for all its hyperbolic wit and metrical ingenuity, "Song" fits into the conventional mode of the complaint against female inconstancy. But his finest love poems counter the conventions of the time by their originality of approach, by their ingenuity (particularly in extended and surprising comparisons, as in the celebrated metaphysical conceit of the compass that is developed over the last three stanzas of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"), and by their intellectual and emotional complexity. In Donne's poems, the woman is never merely an object of desire (his love poems are famous for their lack of concern with the physical appearance of the beloved), but a person with her own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual existence.
That at least some of these brilliant and beautiful poems were inspired by Donne's wife is undeniable, although commentators differ in their assessment of what the marriage must have been like. In the relative absence of direct personal testimony, some assume that the passion and intensity of Donne's greatest love poems must be rooted in actualities, while others predicate that their straitened circumstances and Ann's almost constant state of pregnancy must have put enormous pressures on the relationship. Eventually, Donne attracted the notice of several benefactors, including Sir Robert Drury, who provided the poet and his growing family with living quarters, but also insisted that Donne accompany him and his wife on an extended trip to the continent in 1611-12, despite the objections of Donne's pregnant wife. Some have assumed that the prospect of this journey was the occasion for the writing of "A Valediction." Donne was ultimately able to attract the notice of King James I, who made it clear that he wished to see Donne take orders in the Anglican Church. Under such circumstances, ordination was Donne's only path to advancement and financial security, and so Donne was ordained a deacon in 1614.
Whatever the nature of its origins, Donne's religious commitment produced some of his greatest poetry and prose. The sequence of Holy Sonnets shows that in his devotional poetry he was no less witty, original, and even shocking—as in the conclusion of "Batter my heart"—than he had been as a love poet: he had previously used religious imagery to treat romantic love, and now he expressed the intensity of spiritual feeling through romantic and sexual metaphors. In his sermons and his religious verse, Donne frequently expressed a strong sense of guilt and of personal unworthiness. It is of course impossible to say to what degree these attitudes may have been shaped by his own temperament, his Catholic training, or his feelings (if any) of betrayal of the faith for which so many members of his family had made so many sacrifices. Such attitudes may also have had their origins, at least in part, in the circumstances of his marriage. In addition to their poverty, over the nearly sixteen years of their marriage Ann gave birth to twelve children, seven of whom were still alive at the time of her own death in August 1617, a week after being delivered of her last child, a stillbirth. Despite his being left with many young children to raise, Donne, quite unusually for the times and under the circumstances, never remarried. His own life was threatened by a bout of typhoid fever in 1623, an experience that resulted in the writing of his prose Devotions, one of which contains the famous passage beginning with the phrase "No man is an island," which has become part of the common currency of our cultural heritage, known to many who have never even heard of John Donne.
In 1621, Donne became Dean of St. Paul's Church in London. Despite his deteriorating health, he held this position with distinction and growing fame, owing in large part to his eloquent sermons. The most famous of these was the last, known as "Death's Duel" and preached on February 12, 1631, only seven weeks before Donne's own death on March 31, 1631.
T. S. Eliot felt that, for Donne and the poets of his generation, thought and feeling had been an interconnected process, and that after them had occurred a "dissociation of sensibility," a widening gap between thought and feeling, that had plagued poetry ever since. While the validity of the second half of this thesis has since been called into question, no one could disagree with the concept that Donne's poetry embodies a virtually seamless fusion of emotion and intellect, that in the work of this witty and demanding poet we are constantly treated to the entertaining and satisfying spectacle of a man who feels intelligently and thinks passionately. Four hundred years after it was written, Donne's poetry is as original and as startling as when it was new, and in that sense it is still new, and likely to remain so for a long time to come.
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