John Donne: Life and Career

Study Notes

John Donne was born on January 22, 1572, in London, England, and died on March 31, 1631.
He renounced his religion and became a Jacobean Anglican in 1598.
Donne was appointed the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621.
Ben Jonson criticized Donne for his accent in poetry, saying, "Donne for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging."

Donne's series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness is titled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.
Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats were influenced by Donne's poetic style.
In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Donne compared two lovers to two legs of a compass.
Characteristics of Donne's writing style include abrupt openings, various paradoxes, and ironies.
His poetry is divided into love lyrics and religious verses.

Biathantos (1608) was written in defense of self-homicide.
Samuel Johnson coined the term "Metaphysical poets" in 1781.
Ben Jonson referred to Donne as "the first poet in the world in some things".
Features of metaphysical poetry include display of learning, far-fetched images, and conceits.
Donne's two anti-Catholic polemics are Pseudo Martyr and Ignatius his Conclave.

Donne fell in love with and married Anne More.
He wrote Sonnet 17 after the loss of his wife.
The two anniversaries written by Donne in memory of Elizabeth Drury are An Anatomy of the World and Of the Progress of the Soul.

"For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love" is a quote from "The Canonization".
The first lines of the epitaph of Donne are "Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit the universal Monarchy of wit."