Donne, John - Lukas Erne (essay date April 2001)
Lukas Erne (essay date April 2001)
SOURCE: Erne, Lukas. “Donne and Christ's Spouse.” Essays in Criticism 51, no. 2 (April 2001): 208-29.
[In the following essay, Erne focuses on the poem “Show me deare Christ” as evidence of Donne's feelings about Catholicism.]
The life of John Donne is more fully documented than that of any other English poet before the eighteenth century. Its principal stages are well known and uncontested: birth in 1572 into a family of eminent recusants and martyrs; childhood in a devoutly Catholic home; apprentice years at university, the Inns of Court, and in military expeditions; employment by Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, in 1598; fall from grace following his marriage to Ann More in 1601/2; years of frustrated ambition and hope; ordination to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1615; appointment as Dean of St. Paul's in 1621; and death in 1631. Not even the abundance of documents, however,...
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