Donne, JOHN, a striking figure among English poets, was born in London in 1573. His mother was daughter of John Heywood, the epigrammatist, himself related to Sir Thomas More; his father, who belonged to a good old Welsh family, was a prosperous London ironmonger, who died early in 1576, leaving a widow and six children. Young Donne was brought up a Catholic, as his mother and her family were resolute adherents of that faith. In 1584 he was admitted at Hart Hall, Oxford, and here began his life-long friendship with Sir Henry Wotton. There seems to be no evidence for Izaak Walton's statement that he migrated to Cambridge; certainly he took no degree, and appears to have spent some years in foreign travel, returning to be admitted at Lincoln's Inn in 1592. After a careful examination of the points at issue betwixt the Roman and Anglican churches, he ultimately joined the latter communion. In 1596 he accompanied the famous Cadiz expedition of Essex, and after his return was appointed secretary to the lord-keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, who set the highest value upon his services. Here Donne made the acquaintance of many of the chief men of his day, and wrote, without printing it, great part of his poetry. His wit, his personal beauty, and the charm of his personality brought him the warmest friendships, and the passionate love withal of Anne, the young daughter of Sir George More, brother of the lord-keeper's wife. The pair were secretly married about the close of 1600, the bride being but sixteen years old. Sir George More was violently enraged, at once caused Donne and his confidants to be committed to prison, and persuaded the lord-keeper into dismissing him from his office. The young couple were, however, befriended by other of the wife's relatives, and ere long Donne found a footing at court, where the disputations king listened to his opinion, but for years put off doing anything for him. His Pseudo-Martyr (1610) was written in compliance with a royal command to buttress the royal argument about the attitude of Catholics to the oath of allegiance. During this period also Donne wrote much verse. His Divine Poems he sent in 1607 to George Herbert's mother. The first poem that he printed was his famous elegy on Sir Robert Drury's daughter (1611), which procured him the friendship of a powerful patron, who carried Donne abroad with him for some months. It was at Paris that he saw pass twice before him the famous vision of his wife with a dead child in her arms, which was verified by a messenger twelve days later. His friend Morton, afterwards Bishop of Durham, had long urged Donne to take holy orders, and after his fresh disappointment at not obtaining any state employment through the help of Somerset, he devoted himself seriously to the study of theology, and was at length ordained early in 1615. The king at once appointed him a royal chaplain, and as many as fourteen country livings were offered him within a year. He accepted in 1616 the rectory of Keyston, in Huntingdonshire, as well as that of Sevenoaks, keeping the latter until his death. As reader also at Lincoln's Inn, he quickly took the front rank among the preachers of the time, 'weeping,' says Izaak Walton, 'sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives: here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a virtue so as to make it beloved, even by those that loved it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible addition of comeliness.' In the August of 1617 the death of his much-loved wife, the mother of his seven living and five buried children, left him almost detached from the world, his soul 'elemented of nothing but sadness;' yet he continued to preach with saint-like fervour for ten years after his elevation to the deanery of St Paul's in 1621. He died 31st March 1631, and was buried in St Paul's, under a monument representing him wrapped in his shroud, which fortunately survived the great fire.
Ben Jonson told Drummond that he esteemed Donne 'the first poet in the world in some things,' but that he would perish 'for not being understood;' and Dryden's judgment was that he was 'the greatest wit though not the best poet of our nation.' His poems were assiduously handed about among his contemporaries, with whom his influence was supreme, but Ben Jonson's prophecy has come true, except of a few readers who have eyes to discern poetry of rare quality, hidden like precious jewels in the midst of a dross of distressing obscurities of thought and imagery, elaborate ingenuity or rather fantasticality, and the most perversely far-fetched allusiveness, shallow philosophising, and laborious unrhythmical wit. His early amatory poems are lava-streams aglow with passion at white-heat, which cannot flow freely for the cinders that obstruct the current, although ever and anon revealing with startling unexpectedness the purity and intensity beneath. Peculiarly characteristic of Donne's poetry is that swift transition at will from the fleeting images of voluptuous pleasure to the abiding mystery of death, which sometimes recalls strangely the master-touch of the much greater Rossetti. Amid much that is hardly poetical at all, Donne's saving grace as a poet is, in Mr Saintsbury's phrase, his 'fiery imagination shining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowy thoughts with the lightning of fancy.'
Donne's poems were first collected by his son in 1633. Of these the best edition is that of Dr Grosart, in two volumes of his 'Fuller Worthies Library' (1872). Alford's edition of his works in six volumes (1839) is far from satisfactory. It includes most of the sermons, of which Dr Jessopp accounts for no less than 180, written and preached within sixteen years, but its pious editor thought fit to leave out many of the earlier poems—Donne's real claim to a permanent place in English letters—although indeed he could claim for countenance the fact, as Walton tells us, that the dean himself in later life 'wished they had been abortive, or so shortlived that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals.' For his life see Walton's masterpiece (ed. Causton); the Poems, ed. Chambers, with introduction by Saintsbury (1896); Dr Jessopp in the Dictionary of National Biography, his monograph on Donne (mainly as churchman, 1897), and E. Gosse's Life and Letters of Donne (2 vols. 1899).