SOURCE: Marotti, Arthur F. “Donne as Social Exile and Jacobean Courtier: The Devotional Verse and Prose of the Secular Man.”¹ In Critical Essays on John Donne, edited by Arthur F. Marotti, pp. 77-101. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1994.

In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Marotti examines the conflicts revealed in Donne's poetry and letters as he seeks employment and advancement in the court. Marotti finds that pieces such as “A Litanie” and “Hymn to God the Father,” which he sent to potential patrons to obtain positions, are “politically encoded” religious poems that “transpose public forms into private devotions.”

Donne's religious poems, particularly those pieces he composed in the decade preceding his ordination, were fundamentally coterie texts. He gave sacred verse to such friends as Sir Henry Goodyer, George Garrard,² and Magdalen Herbert. The appearance of religious poems in Rowland Woodward's manuscript collection suggests that such work...