Biography of John Donne

Biography of whoremaster Donne lav Donne was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and priest. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noned for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, ghostly poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and addresss. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, speci altogethery compared to that of his contemporaries. Donnes style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations.These features, on with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the suaveness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His archaeozoic career was marked by poetry that bore immense association of British society and he met that k presentlyledge with sharp criticism . Another important theme in Donnes poetry is the idea of true devotion, something that he worn out(p) much time considering and theorising around.He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly far-famed for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Despite his vast education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after(prenominal) his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne Moore, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders.He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Pauls Cathedral in London. He as well served as a member of parliament in 1601 and in 1614. Biography Early Life Donne was born in London, into a Roman Catholic family when practice of that reli gion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His experience, also named bathroom Donne, was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. Donnes father was a view Roman Catholic who avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of persecution.Donnes father died in 1576, leaving his wife, Elizabeth Heywood, the responsibility of raising their children. Elizabeth was also from a dissentient Roman Catholic family, the fille of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She was a groovy-niece of the Roman Catholic martyr doubting Thomas More. This tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donnes closer relatives, many of whom were executed or exiled for apparitional reasons. Donne was educated privately however, there is no evidence to adjudge the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits.Donnes mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with thr ee children, a few months after Donnes father died. Two more of his sisters, bloody shame and Katherine, died in 1581. Donnes mother, who had lived in the Deanery after Donne became Dean of St. Pauls, survived him, dying in 1632. Donne was a student at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford, from the age of 11. After three years at Oxford he was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years.He was unable to obtain a degree from each institution because of his Catholicism, since he could not take the Oath of Supremacy required of graduates. In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies society legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592 he was admitted to Lincolns Inn, one of the Inns of Court. His brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, whom Henry betrayed under torture. Harrington was tortured on the rack, hanged until not quite d ead, then was subjected to disembowelment.Henry Donne died in Newgate prison of bubonic plague, leading John Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith. During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although there is no present detailing precisely where he travelled, it is known that he travelled across Europe and later fought with the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597) and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe. fit to Izaak Walton, who wrote a biography of Donne in 1658 .. he returned not back into England till he had stayed some years, first in Italy, and then in Spain, where he do many useful observations of those countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned perfect in their languages. Izaak Walton By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. He was appoin ted chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egertons London home, York House, Strand close to the castle of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.Marriage to Anne More During the conterminous four years, he fell in love with Egertons niece Anne More. They were married serious to begin with Christmas in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower and Annes father. This wedding ruined Donnes career and earned him a short stay in Fleet Prison, along with Samuel Brooke, who married them, and the man who acted as a witness to the wedding. Donne was released when the marriage was proven valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two.Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her more or less losing his post, he wrote after his name John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law a nd received his wifes dowry. After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country carriage in Pyrford, Surrey. Over the next few years, he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, depending on his wifes cousin Sir Francis Wolly to house him, his wife, and their children. Because Anne Donne bore a unused baby almost every year, this was a very generous gesture.Though he practised law and may have worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity, with a growing family to provide for. Anne bore twelve children in sixteen years of marriage (including two stillbirthstheir one-eighth and then, in 1617, their last child) indeed, she spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing. The ten surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donnes patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret, and Elizabeth.Francis, Nicholas, and Mary died before they were t en. In a state of despair, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one less mouth to feed, but he could not spread the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote, but did not publish, Biathanatos, his defence of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet. Career and Later Life Donne was elected as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Brackley in 1602, but this was not a paid position.The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave him a means to seek patronage and many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, curiously Sir Robert Drury, who came to be Donnes chief patron in 1610. Donne wrote the two Anniversaries, An Anatomy of the field (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul, (1612), for Drury. In 1610 and 1611 he wrote two anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius his Conclave. Alt hough James was pleased with Donnes work, he refused to restitute him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders.At length, Donne acceded to the Kings wishes and in 1615 was ordained into the Church of England. Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge in 1615 and became a royal stag Chaplain in the same year, and was made a Reader of Divinity at Lincolns Inn in 1616. In 1618 he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was on an embassy to the princes of Germany. Donne did not return to England until 1620. In 1621 Donne was made Dean of St Pauls, a leading (and well-paid) position in the Church of England and one he held until his death in 1631. During his period as Dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen.In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combine of a cold followed by a period of fever. During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pa in, and sickness that were published as a intelligence in 1624 under the title of Devotions upon emergent occasion. One of these meditations, Meditation XVII, later became well known for its phrase for whom the bell tolls and the statement that no man is an island. In 1624 he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I.He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher and 160 of his sermons have survived, including the famous Deaths Duel sermon delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631. Death It is thought that his final illness was stomach cancer, although this has not been proven. He died on 31 March 1631 having written many poems, most only in manuscript. Donne was buried in old St Pauls Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him was erected (carved from a drawing of him in his shroud), with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself.Donnes monument survived the 1666 fire, and is on display in the present building. Writings Early Poetry Donnes earliest poems showed a true knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pretentious courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a world populated by all the fools and knaves of England. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne.He argued that it was better to examine carefully ones religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming A Harry, or a Martin taught them this. Donnes early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex. In Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed, he poetically undre ssed his mistress and compared the act of caress to the exploration of America.In Elegy XVIII, he compared the gap between his lovers breasts to the Hellespont. Donne did not publish these poems, although did allow them to circulate widely in manuscript form. any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls It tolls for thee.. Donne, Meditation XVII Some have speculated that Donnes numerous illnesses, financial strain, and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more somber and pious tone in his later poems.The change can be clearly seen in An Anatomy of the World (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeths demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the Fall of Man and the terminal of the universe. The poem A Nocturnal upon S. Lucys Day, Being the Shortest Day, concerns the poets despair at the death of a loved one. In it Donne expresses a feeling of utter negation and hopelessness, apothegm that I am every dead thing re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death. This famous work was probably written in 1627 when both Donnes friend Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and his daughter Lucy Donne died. Three years later, in 1630, Donne wrote his will on Saint Lucys day (13 December), the date the poem describes as Both the years, and the days deep midnight. The increasing gloominess of Donnes tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. His early belief in the value of scepticism now gave mood to a firm faith in the traditional teachings of the Bible. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne focused his literary career on religious literature.He quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. The lines of these sermons would come to influence future works of English literature, such as E rnest Hemingways For Whom the Bell Tolls, which took its title from a passage in Meditation XVII of Devotions upon rising Occasions, and Thomas Mertons No Man is an Island, which took its title from the same source. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the yard of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally.One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, Death Be Not Proud, from which come the famous lines Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. Even as he lay dying during bestow in 1631, he travel from his sickbed and delivered the Deaths Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Deaths Duel portrays life as a smasher descent to suffering and death, to date sees hope in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection. StyleHis work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the Metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by the critic Dr Johnson, following a comment on Donne by the poet John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693 He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign and perplexes the minds of the exquisite sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnsons 1781 work of biography and criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth degree Celsius in which there appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets. Donnes immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the classic poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. H owever he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early twentieth century by poets such as T.S. Eliot and critics like F R Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic. Donnes work suggests a healthy appetite for life and its pleasures, while also expressing deep emotion. He did this through the use of conceits, wit and intellectas seen in the poems The Sun Rising and Batter My Heart. Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in The canonization.Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed cliched comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most f amous of Donnes conceits is found in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning where he compares two lovers who are separated to the two legs of a compass. Donnes works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies.His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donnes poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wifes death), and religion. John Donnes poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble perfunctory speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging).Some scholars believe that Donnes literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, su ch as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this datingmost of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his Anniversaries which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year. LegacyDonne is commemorated as a priest in the calendar of the Church of England and in the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 31 March. Sylvia Plath, interviewed on BBC Radio in late 1962, said the following about a book review of her collection of poems titled The Colossus that had been published in the United Kingdom two years earlier I guess being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne but not quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I snarl the weight of English literature on me at that point. The memorial to Donne, modelled after the engraving pictured above, was one of the few such memorials to surviv e the Great combustion of London in 1666 and now appears in St Pauls Cathedral where Donne is buried. Donne in Literature In Margaret Edsons Pulitzer prize-winning play Wit (1999), the main character, a professor of 17th century poetry specialising in Donne, is dying of cancer. The play was adapted for the HBO film Wit starring Emma Thompson. Donnes Songs and Sonnets feature in The Calligrapher (2003), a unexampled by Edward Docx.In the 2006 novel The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, Donnes works are frequently quoted. Donne appears, along with his wife Anne and daughter Pegge, in the award-winning novel Conceit (2007) by Mary Novik. Joseph Brodsky has a poem called Elegy for John Donne. The love story of Donne and Anne More is the subject of Maeve Harans 2010 historical novel The Lady and the Poet. An excerpt from Meditation 17 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions serves as the opening for Ernest Hemingways For Whom The Bell Tolls. Marilynne Robinsons Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gi lead makes several references to Donnes work.Donne is the favourite poet of Dorothy Sayers fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey, and the Wimsey books include numerous quotations from, and allusions to, his work. Donnes poem A Fever (incorrectly called The Fever) is mentioned in the penultimate paragraph of the novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. Edmund Bunny Corcoran writes a paper on Donne in Donna Tartts novel The Secret History, in which he ties together Donne and Izaak Walton with help of an imaginary philosophy called Metahemeralism.Donne plays a significant role in Christie Dickasons The Noble Assassin (2011), a novel based on the life of Donnes patron and putative lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Donne in Popular Culture John Renbourn, on his 1966 debut album John Renbourn, sings a version of the poem, Song Go and Catch a Falling Star. (He alters the last line to False, ere I count one, two, three. ) Tarwater, in their album Salon des Refuses, have put The memento to song.The plot of Neil Gaimans novel Stardust is based upon the poem Song Go and Catch a Falling Star, with the fallen star turned into a major character. wharf Chilcott has arranged a choral piece to Donnes Go and Catch a Falling Star. Van Morrison pays tribute to the poet on Rave On John Donne and makes references in many other songs. Lost in Austen, the British mini series based on Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice, has Bingley refer to Donne when he describes taking Jane to America, John Donne, dont you know? License my roving hands, and so forth. Las