There's just a sheer faculty there for language, which is very evident from early on. The other driver, I think, for him to become a writer, is it a calling card? He is inhabiting a coterie of clever, witty, male friends at Oxford at Cambridge and then later at the inns of court in London. And so there's a desire to impress, and also in his verse epistles, to wealthy potential patrons,. There's a need to flatter, to seduce, to persuade and cajole. Throughout his writing, there's a strong sense of loss and valediction and parting.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Donne (1573-1631), known now as one of England’s finest poets of love and notable in his own time as an astonishing preacher. He was born a Catholic in a Protestant country and, when he married Anne More without her father's knowledge, Donne lost his job in the government circle and fell into a poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. As Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631 when he was plainly in his dying days, as if preaching at his own funeral.
The image above is from a miniature in the Royal Collection and was painted in 1616 by Isaac Oliver (1565-1617)
With
Mary Ann Lund
Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester
Sue Wiseman
Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
And
Hugh Adlington
Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham