ABSTRACT
Donne was a popular poet who would not publish. But this was not his only contradiction. He was a scholar and a soldier, a cynic and a lover, a satirist and a writer of passionate love-songs, a man of the world, a burrower in folios, and a great preacher. He was both prosaic and poetic; deeply religious, with a frank enjoyment of outward pleasures. As Mr Henley has said of Stevenson, there was in Donne
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter Catechist.
