John Donne was born in London in 1572, probably in January, though the exact day remains uncertain, and he died in London on 31 March 1631. Few English writers have seemed so divided within themselves, or have turned division into such memorable art. He was at once a Catholic child in a Protestant state, an ambitious courtier whose prospects were ruined by love, a husband burdened by debt and bereavement, a poet of e…
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Jasper Mayne, born on 23 November 1604 and dead on 6 December 1672, lived at the intersection of several worlds that seventeenth-century England often tried to keep apart: the theatre and the pulpit, academic wit and ecclesiastical authority, royalist loyalty and the practical necessities of survival under a hostile regime. He was never a poet of the first rank, nor a dramatist whose name became inseparable from an a…
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
