In your view, Dan's love poetry is the most wonderful body of work anyone can imagine. Can you tell us why? Marianne mentioned the opening lines, and I think that speaks to the sheer force of poetic personality. This is really what comes across to us over the centuries. For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love. I do not die for I shall hate all women, so when they are gone. These are incredibly compelling, but it's not only that. There's all of the force combined with Dan's education in rhetoric and logic and disputation. The sheer audacity of the attempt is what strikes us.
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