John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 576 pages
• Published by: W. W. Norton April 23, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0393062600
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393062601
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Weighs: 2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
For his first book, Stubbs has produced a biography of the enigmatic, conflicted poet familiar today to many people mostly thanks to a single, lovely line: "No man is an Island, entire of it self." John Donne—born in 1572, at the outset of the most politically tumultuous and religiously violent era in English history—searched throughout his life for passage to a continent, to find a homeland, to involve himself, as he put it, in mankind. Beginning life as a secular Catholic, Donne ended it as a pious Protestant priest; a dissolute young man, he evolved into a serious intellectual of delicate demeanor; a swashbuckler who fought against Spain for loot and adventure, he buckled down and became one of the finest poetical craftsmen of the Renaissance; a promiscuous loner once focused on making money and powerful friends, he married for love and left it all happily behind. Throughout his life, Stubbs shows, Donne was a study in paradoxes, and one of the strengths of this book is his ready acknowledgment of his subject's contradictions. "Part of the job of this biography," writes Stubbs, "is to trace the strands between these personae and point out the unity underlying them." He succeeds admirably. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Michael Dirda

In 1619, shortly before his election as dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the most distinguished clerics in England sent some of his youthful, and now rather embarrassing, writings to a friend. Included, for instance, was a tract called Biathanatos, which defended suicide. "Publish it not," the eminent churchman insisted, and yet "burn it not." As for the notorious love poems, well, manuscript copies of those had been circulating for years. They, he pointed out, had been "written by Jack Donne, and not by Dr. Donne."

For many readers, John Donne's "Songs and Sonnets" and "Elegies" are the earliest English poems to sound wholly modern. The poet literally shouts at us, "For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love." He can be cynical about casual sex -- "I have lov'd, and got, and told" -- and even ecstatically pornographic: "License my roving hands, and let them go,/ Before, behind, between, above, below."

A real human voice is always pushing against the constraints of meter, while the poetic similes are drawn from science, technology and contemporary history. Donne once compared true lovers to the legs of a draftsman's compass -- inseparable, no matter how far one wanders, and happiest when brought back together again. Even his most mystical speculations are grounded in the human and physical: "Love's mysteries in souls do grow/ But yet the body is his book."

Since Donne's virtual rediscovery around the time of World War I -- largely through the efforts of the scholar H.J.C. Grierson and the poet T.S. Eliot -- this great poet has usually been associated with the 17th century. Yet John Stubbs reminds us that much of his finest poetry was written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Donne (1572-1631) was only eight years younger than Shakespeare. As a Londoner, born and bred, he drank at the Mermaid tavern, applauded the famous plays we now study in school, served as one of the Earl of Essex's men in naval operations against Spain. The swagger and vitality of Donne's poetic voice makes better sense as part of the roistering 1590s.

But whenever poets write about Eros, you can be sure that Thanatos -- Death -- is also on their minds. Donne imagines his skeleton disinterred (with a love token still intact: "a bracelet of bright hair about the bone"); he takes us to their bedside "as virtuous men pass mildly away"; in his best-known "Holy Sonnet" he trumpets the celebrated phrase: "Death be not proud." This obsession with mortality in a plague-stricken era carries over into his most popular prose work, the "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions," a kind of sick-room diary. Its pages crackle with the stark immediacy we associate with the early poems: "Variable, and therefore miserable condition of Man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surpriz'd with a sodaine change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name." In later sections of these somber meditations, Donne widens his vision from the particular to the universal, his language rising gloriously to one of the most famous passages in all of English literature:

"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

According to Stubbs, the importance of community, even of nation, was central to Donne's thought. Apart from his poetic originality and rhetorical magniloquence, he was surprisingly conventional, even something of a jingoist and occasionally a toady. He was born a Roman Catholic at a time when the Church was persecuted in England, when Jesuits acted as spies as well as priests, and the entire nation was riven with suspicion, hatred and fear. But by his 20s, Donne had rejected his natal religion, at least in part because it gave him no way to advance in life. Donne's family wasn't poor -- his father had made a good deal of money as an ironmonger -- and he attended Oxford and the equivalent of law school at the Inns of Court. But unless you were willing to conform to the Church of England, you might easily end up like Donne's brother -- dying in prison for aiding enemies of the state. Surely, what really mattered was simply to be a good and loving Christian.

After Donne had conformed to the English church, he started his climb up the rungs of the Elizabethan bureaucracy, starting very well indeed as the legal secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal. Then he made what his first biographer, Izaak Walton, called the mistake of his life: In his late 20s, the young go-getter fell in love with the teenaged Ann More, the daughter of Sir George More. They married secretly, and when the truth came out, Donne lost his job, Ann was turned out by her father, and the two lovebirds were faced with utter poverty. (As the epigram had it: "John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone.") The couple were taken in by a relative of Ann's, and for ten years Donne scraped and bowed to regain his lost position in society. To no avail. After all, he had committed a serious act of theft, depriving the More family of a valuable commodity, for in those days a marriage was based on money and social position, not something as silly as love. And then there were those naughty poems! So Donne took on freelance legal work, studied theology and languages on the side, and gave his wife baby after baby.

Because he was a fundamentally serious man, but also because he was an increasingly desperate one, the priesthood began to make more and more sense. By now the harried husband and father was in his 40s, James I was on the throne and some of his youthful indiscretions had been forgiven. Once ordained in 1615 -- no one seems to have bothered about special training -- Donne learned to preach brilliantly, to employ his skillful pen as a tool of the king and to tread carefully in theological contests between the austere Puritans and what we might now call the more ritualistic Anglo-Catholics.

Ann died only a few years into his new career -- she was just 33 and had borne him a dozen children, only half of whom survived to adulthood -- and he never married again. Indeed, in his later years Donne inveighed against the snares of the flesh, reminding us with his wondrous eloquence that we are just "a volume of diseases bound together" and that "all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death." He added, driving home the point, "Nor was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart between Newcastle and Tyburn -- between prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake." Open your eyes, sinner, and look to your salvation.

The author of "The Extasie" and "On His Mistress Going to Bed" may be the first English poet about whom a true and relatively full biography can be written. We possess volumes of letters, sermons, verse and lots of secondary material. In John Donne: The Reformed Soul, the young English scholar John Stubbs employs all these, focusing resolutely on the life rather than the work. Sometimes he presumes, a little rashly, to quote lines from the poems as registers of actual events and feelings. In the end, he also suggests that we understand the mature John Donne as a figure of moderation at a time of increasing religious fanaticism. Fair enough. But most of us will still prefer the bravado of rakish Jack Donne -- "I can love both fair and brown . . . I can love her, and her, and you, and you" -- or the hellfire eloquence of St. Paul's Dr. Donne:

"God is the Lord of Hosts, and he can proceed by martial law; he can hang thee upon the next tree; he can choke thee with a crumb, with a drop, at a voluptuous feast; he can sink down the stage and the player, the bed of wantonness and the wanton actor, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell; he can surprise thee, even in the act of sin."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
The complex life of a former rake, politico, and then dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. And, above all, a master of the written word. The author of this biography writes in a lively style that does credit to his subject. I do not usually think "Afterwords" are justified. In this case, this device provides for a nicely done close, with its linkage between Dr. Donne and our age's great physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Dr. Donne's words still speak to our largely unchanged human condition.) By a young scholar, John Stubbs. This is an excellent first book. Comments (2) | | (Report this)