The poet's fame and appeal is the drama of the songs that he creates. Walton describes him preaching from the pulpit like an angel from a cloud, weeping in earnest. In Dun's sermons you find more of a sense of the eye rather than the first person pronoun. He figures himself as a sinner often and it attempts to move his auditory that way. It did seem as though all of Dun's experience at treading that very careful political religious line slightly ill-judged with the new regime of Lord as Archbishop.
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