Donne moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Donne was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution family members were imprisoned and tortured. In addition to Carey’s study, there’s a recent comprehensive biography by John Stubbs. The facts of Donne’s life are well known. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes.
She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract.
Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age.
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