The Characteristics Of The Metaphysical Poets

14 Pages 3446 Words

art in embassies to Holland and Russia and writing political pamphlets and satires. Marvell died on the 16th August 1678 of tertian argue, and the negligence of the attending physician. He was buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-fields.
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family, a precarious thing at a time when anti catholic sentiment was rife in England. His mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the daughter of John Haywood the writer, who had married Sir Thomas More’s niece. So he was already born into a background of literacy. Donne was one of six children but by the time he was 21 years old only one of them, his sister Anne, was still alive. His mother married twice after his father’s sudden death in 1567. His education began with private tuition at home and later at Oxford and almost certainly Cambridge as well.
After travelling, upon his return to England in 1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the Great Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere. Donne was beginning a promising career. He sat in Queen Elizabeth’s last parliament, for Brackley. But in 1601, he secretly married Lady Egerton’s niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and thereby ruined his own worldly hopes. Egerton dismissed Donne from his post and for the next dozen years the poet had to struggle to support his growing family. During the next few years Donne made a meagre living as a lawyer, which would have broadened his logical mind and developing arguments.
As Donne approached forty, he published two anti- Catholic polemics; they were the final indication of Donne’s abandonment of the Catholic faith.
As London was Donne’s home his outlook was naturally urban and sophisticated which certainly influenced his writing.
Donne reluctantly entered the ministry and was appointed the Royal Chaplain later in the year of 1615...