John Donne Biography

This Biography consists of approximately 4 pages of information about the life of John Donne.

John Donne Biography

This Biography consists of approximately 4 pages of information about the life of John Donne.
This section contains 1,035 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the John Donne Biography

Encyclopedia of World Biography on John Donne

John Donne (1572-1631), English metaphysical poet, Anglican divine, and pulpit orator, is ranked with Milton as one of the greatest English poets. He is also a supreme artist in sermons and devotional prose.

John Donne's masculine, ingenious style is characterized by abrupt openings, paradoxes, dislocations, argumentative structure, and "conceits"--images which yoke things seemingly unlike. These features in combination with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax, and his tough eloquence were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. Since Donne's times such poetry has been unaptly called "metaphysical"--a term more appropriate for the philosophical verse of Lucretius.

Son of a prosperous ironmonger of Welsh ancestry, Donne was born between Jan. 4 and June 19, 1572, and was bred a Londoner and a Roman Catholic. His mother, a great niece of Sir (later...

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This section contains 1,035 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the John Donne Biography
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John Donne from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.