John Donne’s life and poetry

John Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572, during a strong anti-Catholic period in England. Donne’s father, also named John, was a prosperous London merchant. His mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the grand-niece of Catholic martyr Thomas More. Religion would play a tumultuous and passionate role in John’s life.Donne’s father died in 1576, and his mother remarried a wealthy widower. He entered Oxford University at age 11 and later the University of Cambridge, but never received degrees, due to his Catholicism. At age 20, Donne began studying law at Lincoln’s Inn and seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. During the 1590s, he spent much of his inheritance on women, books and travel. He wrote most of his love lyrics and erotic poems during this time. His first books of poems, “Satires” and “Songs and Sonnets,” were highly prized among a small group of admirers.In 1593, John Donne’s brother, Henry, was convicted of Catholic sympathies and died in prison soon after. The incident led John to question his Catholic faith and inspired some of his best writing on religion. At age 25, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England. On his way to a promising career, John Donne became a Member of Parliament in 1601. That same year, he married 16-year-old Anne More, the niece of Sir Egerton. Both Lord Egerton and Anne’s father, George More, strongly disapproved of the marriage, and, as punishment, More did not provide a dowry. Lord Egerton fired Donne and had him imprisoned for a short time. The eight years following Donne’s release would be a struggle for the married couple until Anne’s father finally paid her dowry.In 1610, John Donne published his anti-Catholic polemic “Pseudo-Martyr,” renouncing his faith. In it, he proposed the argument that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their religious loyalty to the pope. This won him the king’s favor and patronage from members of the House of Lords. In 1615, Donne converted to Anglicanism and was appointed Royal Chaplain. His elaborate metaphors, religious symbolism and flair for drama soon established him as a great preacher. In 1617, John Donne’s wife died shortly after giving birth to their 12th child. The time for writing love poems was over, and Donne devoted his energies to more religious subjects. In 1621, Donne became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. During a period of severe illness, he wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” published in 1624. This work contains the immortal lines “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” That same year, Donne was appointed Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West and became known for his eloquent sermons. As John Donne’s health continued to fail him, he became obsessed with death. Shortly before he died, he delivered a pre-funeral sermon, “Death’s Duel.” His writing was charismatic and inventive. His compelling examination of the mortal paradox influenced English poets for generations. Donne’s work fell out of favor for a time, but was revived in the 20th century by high-profile admirers such as T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. Poetry What makes his poetry written three centuries ago so vivid to a contemporary reader? Mind, I do not mean to say that his poetry is popular, or that it is often read on the Underground, or that it is found in every person’s library (though some of this may be true to some Russian readers, thanks to Brodsky’s and Kruzhkov’s translations of Donne’s poems into Russian). Yet to the English readers, Donne’s poetry which had long been neglected became familiar as a result of the critical revaluation accomplished by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and other modernist writers and critics of the early 20^th century (see T.S. Eliot’s essay Metaphysical Poets, 1921). A proof of this can be found in the much quoted title-cum-epigraph to Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which comes from Donne’s Book of Pray and Meditations (1623)Donne is known as ‘the monarch of wit’, ‘a genius of paradox’, and we would expect to find some very dense philosophical (metaphysical) verse in his poems. Yet, perhaps the first thing that strikes us is not so much the meaning (though Donne’s poems are full of meaning) than the immediate response it produces from the reader. A couplet is enough to involve us into Donne’s world. He is a true 17th-century poet through his ability to communicate himself, to amaze and subdue the readerThe main quality of his verse is to express the essential quality of feeling or state in a very laconic way, with a couple of words. Yet, of what kind is the essence of his poetry that it produces such a strong and acute impression? The first poems Donne wrote in 1593-95 were Satires and Elegies. From the very first reading it becomes clear that these are written by a young man, if not a teenager. Why? you can ask. Well, because a young man’s hate of the conventions and the hypocrisy of the adults is there; the people around seem to him to be all liars, flatterers and hangers-on. They should be got rid of with a stroke of the pen. Note, that early Donne’s poetry is focused on reality. He would choose a detail and look at it closely till he could express its strangeness with a few words: And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand...All of this explains why Donne’s poetry was in sharp contrast to the style which dominated English poetry of the early 17 century. The latter was high-flown and full of rhetoric whereas Donne’s poetry was the opposite. As a metaphysical poet he would never describe similarities, he was interested in contrasts or paradoxes or conflicting states only. He was attracted by the complicated chemistry when the feelings of love, hatred and laughter are all mixed up. (See T.S.Eliot on the “dissociation of sensibility” in his essay Metaphysical Poets). Is this the reason for his being so modern? This quality of his is especially vivid in his Songs and Sonnets which make up the second stage in his work.

Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practice it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The 'courtly' poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphysical'; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.

T. S. Eliot summed up the views on Donne, Marvell and other in his essay ‘Metaphysical Poets’ (1921). According to Eliot, these poets had the advantage of writing at a time when thought and feeling were closely fused, before the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ set about the time of Milton.

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