Stuart Poetry/Major Literary Figure

John Donne (1572-1631) is the most striking of 17th-century poets. In the 1590s he wrote elegy and satire. The elegies are amorous and urbane, like Ovid. Donne’s gifts for drama and controversy developed early. Schooled in rhetoric and logic, he came from a family devoted to the memory of Sir Thomas More, his mother’s great -uncle. He was brought up by his mother, a Catholic to her death in 1631. Her father and grandfather wrote interludes, and her brother Jasper translated Seneca’s plays.

Donne’s first prose was Paradoxes – ‘ That Only Cowards Dare Die’ - and Problems afforded Women Soules?’ His valedictory poem, telling his wife not to fear for him when he is abroad, begins, unconsolingly, ‘As virtuous men pass quietly away/And whisper to their souls to go ...’. Paradox was a habit confirmed by exclusion. The difficulties of anyone who is not a convinced.

Prose to 1642

During the 17th century prose became plainer, less elaborate. Its stylistic model was not the artful Cicero but the shorter Seneca; and there were English exemplars of this. The first major writers to choose succinctness were Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in his Essays of 1597.

Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester (1555-1626)
XCVI Sermons (1629).
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Essays (1597, 1612, 1625),
Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum
(1620), History of Henry VII (1622), De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), The NewAtlantis (1627).
Robert Burton (1577-1640) The Anatomy of Melancholy(1621, reed 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1651).
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) Religio Medici (wr. c.1635;pub. 1642), Pseudodoxia Epidemics: or, Enquiries intoVery Many Received Tenents, and Commonly PresumedTruths (1646, revd 1650, 1658, 1672); Hydriotaphia, UrneBuriall (1658).