Donne, John
Donne, John (1572–1631),one of the greatest English poets. Born into a Catholic family, Donne converted to the Church of England, entered the priesthood in 1615, and ended his days as Dean of St Paul's. His biographer Izaak Walton divides his literary career in two—separating the love poetry written in his youth from the religious verse of his maturity—but it is impossible to date most of his poems with certainty. He published little poetry in his lifetime, preferring to circulate his work in manuscript. His verse is both metrically and formally experimental, ranging from satire to love lyric, from sonnet to verse epistle, from elegy to hymn. In it he abandons the mythological apparatus that dominated the verse of the 1590s, as Shakespeare did in his sonnets, replacing it with questing analyses of intellectual, emotional, sexual, and spiritual problems, and wittily exploiting metaphors drawn from an abundance of contemporary discourses:...
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