John Donne Biography

John Donne Profile

Full Name: John Donne

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

Stillborn : 2
           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

Jone Donne Notable Works

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 Early Life And Education

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.

His mother Elizabeth Heywood was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family. Her father name was John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. His mother was also a great-niece of Thomas More. After her husband died a few months later, Donne's mother married a wealthy widower Dr John Syminges, with three children of his own.

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.

However, he could not obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required to graduate. John Donne was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school in 1591, one of the Inns of Chancery in London.

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.

John Donne marriage to Anne More

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 was the most famous independent of the Elizabethan poets. He revolted against the conventional imagery, pastoral style of the followers of Spenser. He purposed to the reality of thought and vividness of expression. His poetry is forceful, vigorous and harmonious. His cynical mature and his critical mind led him to write satire such as of ‘The Progress of the Soul’ in 1604. His satires were later on adopted by Dryden and Alexander Pope and other English satirists.

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

His religious poetry was written after 1610. The greatest of his 19 holy sonnets ‘A Hymn to God’, ‘the Father’ is remarkable. It was published after his wife's death in 1617. Donne's religious verses are also intense and personal. They reveal the struggle in his mind before his taking orders in the Anglican Church.

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.

Dryden says, ‘Donne affects the Metaphysics’ and the term ‘Metaphysical’ has become to be applied to John Donne and the group of poets who followed him. Strictly, the word metaphysical means, ‘based on abstract general reasoning’. But Donne's poetry shows more than this. His poem reveals a depth of philosophy a subtlety of reasoning and a blend of thought and feeling, the light and serious etc.

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.

John Donne's Prose

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.

Donne's finest prose works are his sermons which number about 160. In the 17th century England this sermon was an important influence on the life of the people. The finest of Donne's sermons are probably ‘Death's Dwell’ in 1630. Donne is emotional, Personal in his prose works. He uses the dramatic technique to hold on his audience. His use of imagery, unusual wit and analytical mind which exist in his poetry are also present in his prose works.

John Donne influence

Although Donne was too much of an individual for the succeeding poets to resemble him closely. His influence is strongly felt in the courtly and religious poetry of the following generation. The metaphysical school embraces such names as

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

1. What is the age of John Donne?

Answer: 59

2. Who is called the love poet?

Answer: John Donne

3. What are the three moods of love in Donne's poems?

Answer: John Donne poetry are the three moods of love:

(i) arecynical love/anti woman)

(ii) conjugal love/married life)

(iii) Platonic love /spiritual)

4. Who is the speaker of Death be not proud?

Answer: John Donne