The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Donne, John. "Batter my heart, three-personed God." John Donne's Poetry (Norton, 2007).

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

John Donne is one of the most famous literary figures of the early modern English period. While today he is studied as a seminal poet of the seventeenth century, he published few poems during his lifetime. Instead, Donne's work circulated largely in manuscript among small groups of readers called coteries. In fact, literary scholar Arthur Moretti famously referred to Donne as a "coterie poet," arguing that Donne's intimate and often exclusive audiences influenced the work he produced in manuscript.

Donne is also the foremost representative of the metaphysical movement in literature. Metaphysical poems are defined by their highly intellectual themes, their reliance on literary devices like extended metaphor and paradox, and their frequent conflation of the earthly and the divine. Donne's Holy Sonnets are also metaphysical poems, as they engage with devotional themes in complex and often competing ways. "Batter my heart" is a famous example of a metaphysical lyric that obscures the line between erotic and divine love.