John Donne

And what an intimate, colloquial, fearlessly presumptuous address reducing those millions of cosmic miles to a face within earshot of a jibe thrown out of a terrestrial window at someone looking in.

Which makes it all the more astonishing that Donne went off the radar of English poetry for any time at all, let alone for more than 250 years from his death in 1631. Then in 1899, the inspirational critic Arthur Symons declared:  “Donne’s quality of passion is unique in English poetry, . . . a rapture in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture. . . This lover loves with his whole nature”.

If that didn’t tip the nation back to loving Donne, then Eliot did, in a stirring essay, The Metaphysical Poets, in 1919. Suddenly there was a bridge linking reason and passion. People felt befriended by Donne in their confusions, and Donne’s own future, as one of our greatest national poetic treasures ever since, was, in that moment, assured.

‘No man is an island’, said Donne. A challenge to our fantasies of separateness.  His declaration “Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail” has lost none of its thwack. His exciting fearlessness of invention electrifies the journey in this John Donne talk, which will celebrate the two-handed poetic pianism of Donne’s passion and reason, his marriage of human love and religious belief, and his capacity for building meanings with a seemingly limitless variety of words, images and musics. Donne the rebel Elizabethan who re-made poetry, did it his way then, and is, to this day, cool