Donne (whose name, as any Eng Lit student will tell you, was pronounced "Dunne") led a life so full of contradictions that the personality behind it all seems as baffling as much of his verse. Born a Catholic, he became in middle age a Protestant clergyman who developed into one of the greatest preachers in England, at a time when pulpit eloquence was as highly regarded as forensic eloquence had been in ancient Rome. A libertine in his youth, an ardent chaser and seducer of women and the author of poems such as the famous 'To his Mistress on Going to Bed', he turned his back on all that in later life and regarded his early poetry both as a career embarrassment and a standing moral reproach. Though able and highly ambitious, he wrecked his worldly prospects just when they seemed to be burgeoning, by a secret (and possibly illegal) marriage to a girl who was half his age, and whose aristocratic father never forgave him or her.
As David Edwards says, "the most eloquent of Donne's critics was Donne - and he would certainly have agreed that he was complicated and that his style in poetry or prose reflected this personal complexity". Or as the poet himself wrote: "Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one." His rather late religious vocation (which was sincere yet also opportunist, like so much he said or did) seems to have brought him little inner peace or serenity. Unlike his fellow poet-clergyman, George Herbert, Donne is generally haunted by fear of God's wrath and vengeance, rather than hymning the prospect of eternal bliss.
When Donne died aged 59, he was known and remembered as an eminent divine and the author of learned, inspiring sermons, while his poetry was known to relatively few. Even well before his ordination, he had shown no eagerness to publish his poems and for the most part they circulated in manuscript among his close friends or literary colleagues. Ben Jonson, born the same year as he (1572), was one of the handful of contemporaries who took him at his proper value - rather surprising as Jonson was a jealous and highly competitive professional writer. (But then, Donne was a gentlemanly amateur poet, and therefore not in competition; if he had written for the stage, Jonson's attitude might have been different.)
Yet even while he praised Donne as "the first poet in the world, in some things" he predicted that he "for not being understood would perish" - which in fact was close to being the case. Nearly two centuries later, his near-namesake, Dr Johnson, coined the term "metaphysical poets" for the school of 17th-century writers whose "thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not devious, but neither are they just". And in their so-called conceits, so he thought, "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together". The Age of Reason had little time or tolerance for Donne's essentially Baroque genius; Theobald, a leading critic in the era of Pope, described his poetry as "a continued Heap of Riddles".
The Romantics were not much wiser, one noted exception being Coleridge, a clairvoyant critic. The ballad and folk-song bias which runs through so much 19th-century verse made people respond above all to poetry which was "simple, sensuous and passionate", whereas Donne's by contrast is often complex, cerebral and passionate. The great revival of interest in him came mainly in the early decades of the 20th century, though T.S. Eliot, while an admirer to an extent, was doubtful if the renewed vogue for his verse would last. In fact it has, and Donne scholarship appears to be a thriving industry.
Donne was almost exclusively a Londoner, most of whose life was lived within the compass of a few miles on the north bank of the Thames. He was born the son of a prosperous ironmonger, who died when he was a child; his mother, who married three times, came from a fervently Catholic family distantly related to Sir Thomas More. Donne seems to have upheld this tradition until, when he had just passed 20, a family tragedy occurred which wholly altered his outlook.
His brother Henry, who was to have followed him into legal studies, was visited by a Catholic priest to whom he confessed his sins - an act of treason under the first Elizabeth. Both he and the priest were arrested and tortured, and Henry died in a prison epidemic while the priest, William Harrington, was barbarously hanged and quartered. Donne had no intention of sharing his brother's fate. Instead, to prove his newly-found Protestant loyalty, he took part as a volunteer in two naval expeditions against Spain, the first of which (a raid on Cadiz) was successful, while the second was a total failure. These seem to have convinced him that he was not cut out to be a man of action.
He had been a brilliant student at Cambridge and he was an equally good law student at Lincoln's Inn, as well as becoming one of the "town wits" and bright young men who thronged the London playhouses or met in fashionable taverns and eating-houses, sometimes to read their verses aloud.
When he became secretary to Sir George Egerton, Master of the Rolls and a councillor to the Queen, his future seemed assured; but at this stage Donne committed the most fateful act of his life. At the age of 30, when most men were already married and fathers of families, he fell in love with Anne More, the 15-year-old daughter of a rich and influential nobleman who was also his employer's niece. Not only fell in love with her but married her in secret, without her family's consent.
The father, in a rage, refused to recognise the marriage or to give Anne her dowry, while those who had officiated at the event (mostly friends of the poet) spent a short term in prison. Donne's career was in shreds, since he had broken the rules of the establishment, and all his combined talents could not land him another suitable post. The result was a grim interlude in which he lived for years hand-to-mouth, while his family grew steadily and he grubbed for aristocratic or monied patronage; at one stage he even considered suicide. He tried his hand in religious and political controversy, publishing various works in prose, one of which caught the attention of King James I, himself a chronic debater and "the wisest fool in Christendom".
The king had a relatively enlightened religious policy, in terms of the age, and he saw Donne as a possible instrument in helping to make it effective and popular. While reluctant to employ him in diplomatic or administrative posts, he encouraged him towards ordination in the Church of England, which duly took place in 1615 and fully justified the king's faith in his talents. In time Donne became one of the great divines and preachers of the age, Dean of St Paul's and a public figure who preached before the greatest of the land. The poet in him was gradually buried by the churchman. However, his loyal, loving wife died in 1617, worn out by a long succession of pregnancies - a sorrow from which he never quite recovered, though he does not seem to have felt any guilt for wrecking her health.
Some of his children died too, including his favourite daughter Lucy, which strengthened his inner gloom and world-weariness and probably accounts for much of his obsession with death and funereal imagery. (The famous "effigy" of him in St Paul's actually depicts him in his shroud and coffin.) Donne's last illness was a long and painful one before the end came in March 1631. The first edition of his poems came out two years later, followed by a second one in 1635. He had lived well into the reign of Charles I, and though the king was chilly towards him, he would almost certainly have been made a bishop if he had survived a year longer.
David Edwards, who among other distinctions was himself a Church of England dignitary before retiring in 1994, pays more attention than most Donne analysts to the sermons, for which obviously he has special qualifications.
His book seems acute and knowledgeable as well as being notably well written, though also a little wayward in its construction; at times he seems uncertain whether he is writing a biography or a scholarly study, and so falls uneasily between two stools. But Donne in many ways remains a riddle, and is likely to do so - an "awkward" man in his lifetime, and a difficult writer posthumously, whose poetry overall is a strange amalgam of piety and bawdiness, spiritual aspiration and biting topical satire, coarseness and superfine subtlety. He had little feeling for nature, a rare blind spot in English poets, and he appears to have despised verbal melody.
Against that he has intense intellectual energy and a flair for strange, startling imagery which sheds an oblique but powerful light. He is also, in spite of his later clerical career, one of the great erotic psychologists of English verse. Perhaps his fellow-poet and admirer, Coleridge, has put it best:
With Donne, whose Muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clew,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic