![John Donne Biography](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn6hgdotFVfhLsJFbjWqUheycomPL3VTAqFmtZ0QAGrsBuS8afA0goxZUTPspfiU4Ib92aN_nwD9eKyl82RnfTsvE9gBopDsKglMqYKOkKcSsLfqnR6rEMKJfdaTwrxaxNzBJjStXhXnL9/w700/John+Donne+Biography.jpg)
Birth Date: 22 January 1572
Birth Place: London, England
Died Date: 31 March 1631
Death Place: London, England
Buried Place: Old St Paul's Cathedral
Cause of Death: Stomach cancer
Died Age: 59
Zodiac Sign: Aquarius
Parents: Elizabeth Heywood (Mother), John Donne (Father)
Siblings :
1. Mary Donne (Sister)
2. Henry Donne (Brother)
3. Katherine Donne (Sister)
Spouse (s) & Girlfriend : Anne More Donne (m.1601)
Children : 12 (10 surviving, 2 stillborn)
Daughter : 6
1. Lucy Donne
2. Constance Donne
3. Mary Donne
4. Bridget Donne
5. Margaret Donne
6. Elizabeth Donne
Son : 4
1. Francis Donne
2. John Donne
3. Nicholas Donne
4. George Donne
1. John Donne the Younger
2. Stillborn Donne
Occupation: Poet, Priest, Lawyer
Nationality: British
Alma mater: Hart Hall, Oxford
University of Cambridge
Genre: Satire, Love poetry, Elegy, Sermons
Subject: Love, Sexuality, Religion, Death
Literary movement: Metaphysical poetry
1. Death Be Not Proud
2. The Good Morrow
3. The Sunne Rising
4. The Undertaking
5. The Canonization
6. The Flea
7. The Ecstasy
8. The Funeral
9. The Dream
10. A Valediction: Forbidding Morning
11. Holy Sonnets, or Divine Sonnets
12. Biathanatos
13. Pseudo-Martyr
14. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
15. Ignatius His Conclave
John Donne was born in London on 22 January in 1571 or 1572, into a recusant Roman Catholic family. When the practice of that recusant religion was illegal in England. John Donne was the third of six kids of his parents. His name and his father was the same John Donne.
His father was a rich merchant. His father, Donne was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. His father had a name and fame in his circle. But his father died in 1576 when he was only four years old child. His mother Elizabeth Heywood leaving with the responsibility of raising the children alone.
However, John Donne was educated privately. There is no evidence to support strongly claim that he was taught by Jesuits. At the age of eleven in 1583, he began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford. After three years of studies at Hertford College, Oxford, Donne was admitted to the University of Cambridge in 1584. Here he studied for three years at the University of Cambridge. He left at university of Cambridge in 1587. First, Donne was at educated as Catholic. He entered Oxford in 1584 and left in 1587 Then he studied at Cambridge for three years. He was left from London in 1591. Then he entered Lincoln's Inn to study law in 1592.
He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court on 6 May 1592. Five years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1593 and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War, Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled “An Act for restraining Popish recusants”.
In 1593, John Donne's brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington. He died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith. After his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel.
Although there were no strong record details precisely where Donne travelled, he did cross Europe and later fought alongside the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz 1596 and the Azores in 1597 and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe.
In 1597, at the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. Donne was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton's London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in Britain.
The next four years John Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More. In 1601, they were secretly married just before Christmas, against the wishes of both Egerton and George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower and Anne's father.
John Donne's career ruined this wedding, getting him dismissed and put in Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest Samuel Brooke, who married them, and the man who acted as a witness to the wedding.
However, John Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that once Donne wrote to his wife to inform her regarding losing his post, he wrote once his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. It was not until 1609 that Donne brought together with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.
After his release from Fleet Prison, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they resided until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in Mitcham, London, where he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne birth a new baby almost every year. Although he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was during a constant state of monetary insecurity.
In sixteen years marriage life Anne gave birth to 12 children, (including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last-child); indeed, she spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing. The 10 surviving children were constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy, Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Three died before they were only ten years old. In a state of despair that nearly drove him to kill himself, John Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses.
During this time, John Donne wrote, however, didn't publish Biathanatos, his defence of suicide. On 15 August 1617, his wife died, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne lamented her deeply and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet.
John Donne Literary Works
John Donne's love poems, his songs and sonnets were also written in the same period. They are intense and subtle and express the mood of the lovers in a vivid and startling language. Donne's love poems are colloquial rather than conversational. For example, in one of this poem (Canonization) he says,
For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.
A vein (strain) of satire also runs through his poems. Donne's love poems are dramatic although they have delicate emotional responses. He is essentially a psychological poet whose initial concern is feeling. His love poems are a psycho-analysis of the lover's soul. There is a combination of thought and feeling, head and heart, intellect and emotion, in his love poems.
In other words, in his love poem, we get intellectualization of emotion or emotionalization of intellect. Donne's Poems are intensely personal and reveal a powerful and complex feeling and subtlety of thought. Among the best known of his love poems are-
1. The Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
2. The Extasie
3. Good Morrow
4. The Flea
5. Go and Catch a Falling Star.
John Donne's Religious poem
He wrote about his longing for God's love and the horror of death. And this found profound expression in his religious poems. In other words, these religious poems are the expression of his deep and troubled soul. These poems have intellectual subtlety, scholastic learning, use of wit and conceits.
Probably the most important the features of Donne's metaphysics is his use of imagery, conceits, wit and unusual references. His companions are remarkable. For example, departed lovers are like the legs of a pair of a compass, love is a spider, his sick body is a map, the mosquitoes or fleas are used for love.
His prose work is considerable both in bulk and achievement ‘The Pseudomartyr’ (1610) is a defence of oath of allegiance. ‘Ignatius His Conclave’ is a satire. The introduction to Donne's Prose is his ‘Devotion’ (1614) which gives an account of his spiritual struggles during a serious illness. His prose works have many of the qualities of his verse-they are directly personal and reveal a psychological conflict of his mind and his preoccupation with death and sinfulness which is only to be seen in his holy sonnets.
1. George Herbert" (1593-1633),
2. Richard Crashaw (1612-1649)
3. Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)
4. Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
5. Thomas Carew (1594-1639)
6. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
The influence of Donne is evident directly and indirectly in the works of all these poets. But they differ in many important respects from their great master.
John Donne Important Facts
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