John Donne

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

DONNE, John (1572-1631), related on his mother's side to Sir Thomas *More, born into a Catholic family, his uncle Jasper Heywood being the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. His father, a prominent member of the London Ironmongers' Company, died when Donne was 4, and six months later his mother married a Catholic physician, Dr John Syminges. Educated at home by Catholic tutors, Donne went at the age of 11 to Hart Hall, Oxford (not Hertgrod College), favoured by Catholics because it had no chapel, so that recusancy attracted less notice. He may have transferred to Cambridge, but his religion (which he appears to have renounced c. 1593) debarred him at this point from taking a degree in either university. In 1589-91 he may have travelled on the Continent, to Italy and Spain. He sailed as a gentleman volunteer with *Essex to sack Cadiz (1596) and with *Ralegh to hunt the Spanish treasure ships off the Azores (1597). His poems 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' commemorate these voyages. Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal, and in 1601 he was elected MP for Brackley, Northamptonshire, an Egerton seat. He forfeited his chance of a civil career when late in 1601 he secretly married Ann More, Lady Egerton's niece: he was dismissed from Egerton's service and briefly imprisoned. Donne's next 14 years were marked by fruitless attempts to live down his disgrace. At first he depended on the charity of friends and of his wife's relations, living with his ever growing family in a cottage at Mitcham. In 1612 he moved to a London house owned by his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk, whom he had accompanied on his continental travels. In honour of Sir Robert's dead child Elizabeth, whom Donne had never met, he wrote his extravagant Anniversaries. Other friends and patrons in these years were Sir Walter Chute, with whom Donne went to the continent in 1605-6, Sir Henry Goodyer, probably Donne's closest friend, Lucy, countess of Bedford, Magdalen Herbert (mother of George Herbert), and Sir Robert Ker, Viscount Rochester, to whom Donne offered his services in the Essex divorce case. Despite Ker's good offices, James I considered that Donne was unfit for confidential employment and urged him to enter the Church, which he did in 1615. James made him a chaplain-in-ordinary and forced Cambridge (which regarded him as a careerist) to grant him a DD. In the Church Donne held several livings and the divinity readership in Lincoln's Inn. His wife died in 1617 at the age of 33, after giving birth to their 12th child, and the following year Donne went as chaplain to the earl of Doncaster in his embassy to the German princes. His 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany', full of apprehension of death, was written before this journey. In 1621 Donne procured the deanery of St Paul's. One of the most celebrated preachers of his age, as well as its greatest non-dramatic poet, he died on 31 March 1631, having first, as his earliest biographer Izaak *Walton records, had his portrait drawn wearing his shroud and standing on a funeral urn.

Donne was celebrated by contemporaries for his abandoning of Elizabethan classicism's 'soft, melting Phrases' through an 'imperious Wit' (Thomas *Carew). His earliest poems, his 'Satires and Elegies', often lubricious, dazzlingly argued, and luridly self-dramatizing, belong to the 1590s. His unfinished satirical epic 'The Progress of the Soul' bears the date 1601, and some of his Holy Sonnets were probably written in 1610-11. His 'Songs and Sonnets' are, however, largely impossible to date. These love poems encompass the intimate and tender but intellectually strenuous 'Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the dark turbulence of 'Twicknam Garden', the sombre majesty of 'A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day', and libertine lyrics founded on an emotionally complex misogynist casuistry.

Donne's prose works include Pseudo-Martyr (1610), an attack on Catholics who had died for their faith, and Ignatius His Conclave, an attack on the Jesuits (1611). Biathanatos, a defence of suicide, to which Donne confessed a 'sickely inclination', was probably written at this time, but its subject matter made it unpublishable until after his death. His Essays in Divinity (1651) were composed in preparation for his ordination and the Devotions (1624) were assembled in less than a month from notes made during a near-fatal fever. His sermons appeared after his death in three volumes, LXXX Sermons (1640), Fifty Sermons (1649), and XXVI Sermons (1660). These were edited by his son John and based on texts which Donne himself prepared from his rough preaching notes during two periods of rest in the country in 1625 and 1630: their memorable exhortations include the well-known 'No man is an Iland . . . never send to know for whom the bell tols, it tolls for thee'. His poems were collected by his son John and published in 1633 (second, enlarged, edn 1635). See also METAPHYSICAL POETS.

R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (1970); J. Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981); Elegies and Songs and Sonnets (ed. H. *Gardner, 1965); Divine Poems (ed. H. Gardner, 1952; 2nd edn, 1978); Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (ed. W. Milgate, 1967); Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes (ed. W. Milgate, 1978); Paradoxes and Problems (ed. H. Peters, 1980); Ignatius His Conclave (ed. T.S. Healy, SJ, 1969); Essays in Divinity (ed. E. M. Simpson, 1952); Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (ed. J. Sparrow, 1923); Sermons (ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols, 1953-62). There is no collected edition of Donne's letters, the best available approach to one still being E. *Gosse, Life and Letters (2 vols, 1899).

This Is My Play's Last Scene

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