John Donne
(1572–1631)

John Donne was known in his time primarily as a preacher rather than as a poet. Today, however, Donne is considered the most important of the Metaphysical poets and one of the finest writers of the early 17th century.

John Donne was born in 1572 into a prosperous London family of Roman Catholics and was educated by tutors at home. Although Donne studied at Oxford, the anti-Catholic feeling of the time prevented him from taking a degree. From 1589–1591, Donne traveled to continental Europe. In 1592, he was admitted as a law student in London. In the mid-1590s, Donne joined two expeditions as a gentleman-adventurer: the first to Spain with the Earl of Essex, and the second to the Azores with Sir Walter Raleigh to hunt for Spanish treasure ships.

Gallant, witty, and charming, Donne overcame anti-Catholic prejudice for a while and made important connections at court. In 1597, he secured an appointment as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and one of the most powerful courtiers. When Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Ann More and secretly married her in 1601, however, he was dismissed from his post and briefly imprisoned.

Donne's secret marriage negatively affected his fortunes for over a decade. Depressed and anxious, he tried to recover from his disgrace. At first, he depended on the charity of friends to support his family but later he was able to rely on his literary talents. He published several attacks on Catholicism in 1610–1611, publicly signaling that he had renounced the Catholic faith. In 1615, when Donne finally agreed to convert to Anglicanism and take orders as a priest, no less a patron than King James I made him a chaplain and forced Cambridge University to grant him a doctoral degree. In 1621, Donne gained the coveted position of Dean of St. Paul's, one of the most important posts in the entire Anglican hierarchy.

In his new post, Donne won acclaim as a preacher, addressing large congregations of powerful and wealthy courtiers and merchants. Although his sermons were published, his poems circulated mainly in handwritten copies, since their subject matter might have damaged Donne's reputation as an upright clergyman.

In both his poems and his sermons, Donne used a tight, challenging style that relied on unique rhythms and unusual, sustained metaphors called conceits. Such comparisons are one of the hallmarks of English Metaphysical poetry, a genre that was not formally labeled until the 18th century. Besides Donne, the Metaphysical poets included such writers as Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan. The word Metaphysical, which simply means "beyond the physical," refers to the frequent preoccupation in these writers' work with the death of the body and the eternity of the soul. Characteristics of Metaphysical poetry include intellectual playfulness, irony, paradoxes, argument, colloquial speech rhythms, and elaborate and unusual conceits.

Donne died in 1631. Two years later, his son John edited his father's poems and published them in a collected edition. Over the next few decades, three volumes of Donne's collected sermons appeared.

The rapid development of science in the early 17th century had an important impact on the Metaphysical poets and their world-view. In 1609, the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) built the first telescope in Italy. Galileo used his invention to discover the four largest moons of Jupiter, as well as the stellar composition of the Milky Way. In 1618, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1561–1630) proposed his laws of planetary motion, thus greatly expanding people's knowledge of the solar system.

In England, the philosopher-statesmen Francis Bacon (1561–1626) published his treatise Novum Organum (New Instrument) in 1620, outlining his views on scientific inquiry and promoting inductive reasoning as a method of logic. In 1627, Bacon published The New Atlantis, an account of an imaginary, utopian island where collective scientific research results in social progress. In 1628, Bacon's younger contemporary William Harvey (1578–1657), changed the course of medicine when he published his explanation of the circulation of the blood.

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