Contributions
Born in London into a Catholic family at a time when that faith invited persecution, John Donne is the leader of the so-called "Metaphysical" poets. His early secular poetry — Songs and Sonnets, Elegies, Satires — broke with Petrarchan sweetness: nervous, argumentative verse, full of erotic and intellectual daring, built on those unexpected, learned comparisons, the "conceits," that yoke love to cosmology, geography or theology. After years of broken ambition he converted to Anglicanism, was ordained priest in 1615, and in 1621 became Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, one of the greatest preachers of his age: his published sermons are peaks of English prose. His religious poetry — the Holy Sonnets ("Death, be not proud"), the Hymns — and his prose meditations (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written during a grave illness) rank among the most intense texts of English spiritual literature.
Significance
Donne changed what English poetry could do: he brought into it thought in action, passionate reasoning, the roughness of spoken language against conventional melody. Long judged obscure and "difficult," he was rediscovered in the twentieth century — T. S. Eliot made him a master — and recognised as one of the greatest lyric poets of the language. His fusion of feeling and intellect, of the sacred and the carnal, left a lasting mark on modern poetry. His very life is the story of a conversion, of a divided man. Catholic by birth in an England that hunted his people — his brother died in prison for sheltering a priest — he renounced that faith, long sought a post at court, and came only late, from necessity as much as vocation, to the priesthood. The poet of amorous daring and the dean who meditated on death are the same man, and that tension — "Jack Donne" the libertine turned "Dr Donne" the preacher — is the heart of his greatness. To the very end he looked death in the face, in the most literal sense.
Influence
Father of Metaphysical poetry, he inspired Herbert, Marvell and a whole seventeenth-century line, before an eclipse and then a dazzling resurrection in the twentieth: Eliot, Yeats and the modernists held him as a model of the union of thought and emotion. His sermons mark the history of English prose and sacred eloquence. He himself inherited the sonnet tradition only to subvert it, drawing on scholasticism, the "new philosophy" (the astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo that shook the old cosmos), and the law and controversial theology of his time; his experience of persecuted Catholicism and of conversion fed all his spiritual work.
Anecdote
Around 1601 the young Donne, secretary to the Lord Keeper, secretly married Anne More, the seventeen-year-old niece of his master's wife. A match of love and scandal: the girl's father had him imprisoned and driven from his place, breaking his career at a stroke. His biographer Izaak Walton reports the bitter, brilliant words with which Donne is said to have summed up his ruin, punning on his own name: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." Thirty years later, dying, the Dean of St Paul's had his shroud brought, wrapped himself in it standing on an urn, and so posed for a portrait that served as the model for his marble effigy, carved by Nicholas Stone. Of all the old St Paul's razed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, that effigy of a man in his shroud was almost the only one to survive.