Love In John Donne's Poetry

John Donne (1572-1631) is a most accomplished yet controversial English poet of the metaphysical school and a churchman famous for his spellbinding sermons in the 17th century. Most of his works are published posthumously in 1633, of which the most famous are his love poems in various moods. Love and religion are entwined in Donne's works. On the most basic level, they are the two main subjects on which he was moved to write. This paper attempts to conduct a survey into the love conveyed in Donne's poems and carries out an analysis which will locate, describe, and account for Donne's poetic expressions of love as the mixture of secularity and religiosity, idealism and skepticism, and reconciliation of the paradoxes through union of finiteness and infiniteness, by developing an approach through its very attention to particular texts, reveals how these become intelligible only when inserted in a wider context of his secular and religious works against the historical background under which Donne lived, thought, and wrote.