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Other authors named John:
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Author's popularity: 3
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Popularity: -1
Vote: | Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say, the breath goes now, and some say no. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove, Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Contemplative and bookish men must of necessity be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certain witnesses, nor judges. But as long as they go towards peace, that is Truth, it is no matter which way. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | For, thus friends absent speak. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | He must pull out his own eyes, and see no creature, before he can say, he sees no God; He must be no man, and quench his reasonable soul, before he can say to himself, there is no God. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Let us love nobly, and live, and add again years and years unto years, till we attain to write threescore: this is the second of our reign. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Love is agrowing, to full constant light; and his first minute, after noon, is night. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | More than kisses, letters mingle souls. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | O, if thou car'st not whom I love alas, thou lov'st not me. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Pleasure is none, if not diversified. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Running it never runs from us away, but truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet. |
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Biography
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John Donne (pronounced "Dun"; 1572 – March 31, 1631) was a major English poet and writer, and perhaps the greatest of the metaphysical poets. His works include love poetry, sermons and religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and sonnets.
Donne was born and raised in a Roman Catholic family. Two of Donne's relatives had been punished for their Catholicism; his brother had died of a fever in prison after harboring a priest, and an uncle, a Jesuit, executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Queen Elizabeth's government uniformly burdened Catholics with harassment and financial penalties.
Donne was educated at both Oxford (Hertford College) and Cambridge; however, Catholics such as he were barred from graduating, and he thus could not complete his education. As a young man he travelled on the Continent and in 1596–97 accompanied the Earl of Essex on his expeditions to Cádiz and the Azores. On his return he became secretary to Baron Ellesmere and began to achieve a reputation as a poet. His writings of this period, notable for their realistic and sensual style, include many of his songs and sonnets. Donne also composed many satirical verses which betray a searching and sometimes caustic outlook.
The account of Donne's life in the 1590s that comes down to us through Donne's own poems and an early biographer, Izaak Walton, gives us a picture of a young rake. Scholars believe this picture almost certainly misleading, since the account was given by the older Donne, after he had been ordained; he may have wanted to separate, more cleanly than was possible, the younger man-about-town from the older clergyman. Walton tells us that Donne, after making a diligent study of theology, converted to Anglicanism at some point in the 1590s.
After taking part in Essex's military expeditions in 1596–7, he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, a prominent member of the royal court, but he fell in love with Egerton's niece, Anne More, and secretly married her. When More's father found out, he used his influence to get Donne and two of his friends—one who presided over the wedding, another who witnessed it—imprisoned, albeit briefly. Egerton fired Donne.
It was around this time that the two "Anniversaries," "An Anatomy of the World" (1611) and "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612) were written; they reveal that his faith in the medieval order of things had been disrupted by the growing political, scientific, and philosophic doubt of the times.
When released from prison, Donne, reunited with his bride, settled on land owned by More's cousin in Surrey. The couple struggled with their finances until 1609, at which point Donne and his father-in-law reconciled and Donne finally received his wife's dowry. This must have been helpful, since, as Walton tells us, Anne "had yearly a child." His growing family prompted him to seek the favors of the King, and in 1610 and 1611, he wrote two anti-Catholic polemics. One of them was the 1611 satire Ignatius his Conclave, which was probably the first English work to mention Galileo. King James was pleased with Donne's work, but refused to offer him anything but ecclesiastical preferments. Donne resisted taking holy orders. After a long period of financial uncertainty and desperation, though, during which he was twice a member of Parliament (1601, 1614), Donne heeded the King's wishes and was ordained in 1615. With the death of his wife in 1617 the tone of his poetry deepened, particularly in the "Holy Sonnets".
After his ordination, Donne wrote a number of religious works, such as his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and various sermons. Several of these sermons were published during his lifetime. Donne was also regarded as one of the most eloquent preachers of his day. In 1621, Donne was made dean of St. Paul's, a position he held until his death.
The story of Donne's death—as Walton tells it, at least—is justly well known. Suffering through the illness that would kill him only days later, in front of an audience many of whom, according to Walton, said that Donne seemed to be preaching his own funeral sermon, he gave an address called Death's Duell, one of the high points of seventeenth-century English prose. "We have a winding sheet in our mother's womb," he told his listeners, "which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave." He then retired to his quarters, and had a portrait made of himself in his funeral shroud. This portrait he placed near his bedside, where he meditated on it until his death.
External links
* The Literature Network
* Homepage of the John Donne Society
* Selected Poems of John Donne
* Complete sermons of John Donne
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Donne".
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