Bald’s wise, deliberate John Donne: A Life was published in 1970, followed by John Stubbs’s lively and elegant biography in 2006. The first to write his life was his friend Izaak Walton, who was more famous for his celebrations of fishing and whose life of Donne has a good claim to be the first literary biography. The poet has been extremely well treated by his biographers. Even odder and also dazzling is David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (2016), which spends 300 pages in the analysis of a single Donne sonnet. John Carey’s idiosyncratic and brilliant 1981 study John Donne: Life, Mind and Art tracks the repeated images across the poems, prose works and sermons. Even the driest of textual scholarship is caught up in this Donne effect. In ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, which is perhaps the most beautiful poem about grief in the English language, he insists: ‘Study me then, you who shall lovers be/ At the next world… For I am every dead thing.’ĭonne turns his scholars into lovers, and as a result books about him tend surprisingly often to rise up to the sparkiness of their histrionic, funny and endlessly fascinating subject. He’s like a child who plays hide and seek by closing his eyes and shouting out here I am. Everywhere, there is something raw and exposed about him.

‘O my America! My new-found land!’ he greets her, absurdly. One famous poem pictures his mistress undressing, but it is really the speaker who is revealed: in his desperate lust, his foolishness. Donne does something a little different, which is to circumvent this slightly tired question with an invitation to laugh along. Many poets play games with identity, with whether the speaker of the poem is or is not the same as the poet.

It is equally because his poems invite us, to an unusual degree, to feel that we might know him. This is in part because of his insistence that even the most pious of prayers might be improved with a penis joke. It is difficult to read Donne and not to like him, at least some of the time. The couple had 12 children and were, he later said, ‘undone’ by their marriage. His young bride’s family name was More the jokes pretty much wrote themselves. ‘It is irremediably done,’ he wrote to his new father- in-law, and of course he spells it ‘donne’. A lesser man might have chosen to play this fairly straight, but not JD. He sat down to write a letter to the enraged father of the teenage girl he had just married in secret. John Donne: for a poet this must have felt a little like destiny, and even in the most unlikely of moments he couldn’t resist making puns.

The transformations of john donne