John Donne

No, I didn’t forget about my goal of making a hundred friends by memorising their poems. I just took a break to reconsider the feasibility of this project, but have decided to go forward.

So, today we meet Edmund Spenser. You know Mr. Spenser, right? He was born in 1552 or 1553, the son of a journeyman clothmaker, went to Pembroke College but required financial assistance to do so (apparently, doing menial work for the college), and as an adult spent much of his career as a government official in Ireland. He became well-known in his own time, though, for his poetry and especially for his epic, The Faerie Queene.

Our next acquaintance is with John Donne, who lived about a century before Alexander Pope, having been born in 1572 and passing away in 1631, and like Pope his family’s Catholic faith caused him some trouble early in his life. Interestingly, his mother was a direct descendent of St. Thomas More, and though he was able to study at Oxford and Cambridge, he couldn’t receive a degree there because his religion prevented him from swearing a required oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth. Unfortunately, he did not have More’s constancy, and after traveling in Italy and Spain for a few years, left the Church and became an Anglican sometime while working as a secretary for Sir Thomas Egerton. Disappointing, but I won’t doubt his sincerity given his reputation among those who knew him. He would eventually join the Anglican priesthood, despite feeling himself unworthy, after years of urging from his friends and even from King James I. He did suffer about ten years of hardship, though, because of his relationship with Anne More, who he secretly married because he knew he wouldn’t receive her father’s permission, which in those days was career suicide. In any case, he in his own lifetime he earned a prominent reputation for his works on theology, canon law, and of course, poetry. To give an idea of the respect other poets have had for Donne, his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Richard Corbett wrote poems in his honour, as did Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Coleridge’s son, Hartley, later on - and that’s just from a quick search; doubtless more examples can be found.