ABSTRACT
We know more of the outward events of the life of John Donne than of any poet or writer of his age, and yet he remains a personage strange and enigmatic, and a poet more often misjudged than appreciated. Donne’s was a twofold greatness. A biographer, not long since, wrote a Life of Donne in which he confesses to little sympathy with his poetry. He was writing of the famous Dean of St Paul’s, amongst the most learned divines in an age of deep theological learning, the most brilliant and persuasive preacher of his day. Of Donne as a divine we have already heard in this book. But Donne would remain great in the history of literature with the Dean of St Paul’s neglected, in that he is the most original, the most independent, the most perverse, yet in some respects among the most illuminated of the poets of the latter days of Elizabeth. Nor is it possible to separate wholly these two aspects of Donne’s career; for although there is little of the future divine in those strange and cynical erotic poems which formed so interesting a part of the exercises of his youth, still his poetry would be far from what it is to us were the spirituality of his later poems not to enter into account. On the other hand, it is the power of poetry in the divine as well as the beauty and sanctity of his life that endeared him to those whose privilege it was to know him, and made him a power for good in his day….
