John Donne

John Donne is among the central English poets of the seventeenth century. His early secular love lyrics and later religious meditations—written after he became Dean of St Paul’s—share the same wit, paradox, and bodily intensity.

In the Holy Sonnets, faith is not a calm hymn but an experience of fracture, pleading, and remaking. Lines such as “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” remain among his most quoted.

Donne helped later modernists, including Eliot, rediscover “sensuous thought”: ideas that can be felt as keenly as sensations, and love or God approached as fierce argument.