The father of the Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, led a decidedly wayward life. Born into a well-connected Catholic family, he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, and as a young rake knocked around in London with Christopher Brooke and Ben Jonson. In 1596, he journeyed to Cadiz with the Earl of Essex as a gentleman volunteer and sailed to the Azores with Sir Walter Raleigh. Back in England, a promising career in the civil service, as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton and MP for Brackley, was scuppered when he made what is quaintly described as an unsuitable, marriage. (He secretly married Lady Egerton's 17 year-old niece.)

At James I's urging, he entered the Anglican Church in 1615 and finally procured the Deanship of St Paul's in 1621. In the last ten years of his life, he became renowned as one of the foremost preachers of his age. Phrases from his sermons ('No man is an island', 'for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee') are so familiar as to be clichés today.

Donne wrote satires, elegies and love poems throughout his life. Although circulated among his peers and patrons, they were only collected and published following his death in 1631. Donne's witty, passionate and intelligent poetry broke with Elizabethan melodies and imagery. He composed using the rhythms of colloquial speech and his dramatic imaginative conceits were always followed through with a strenuous logic. T.S. Eliot, in particular, revered Donne's intellectual vigour and his allusiveness.