In Donne's poetry, an eccentric and often egocentric sensibility is explored and expressed in a unique voice and often in extreme terms. Donne's canon is large, comprising a great deal of prose as well as satires, love elegies, epigrams, epithalamions, epicedes and obsequies, verse letters, holy sonnets and other divine poems.

Sponsor Message.

His most famous grouping is the "Songs and Sonets," which includes most of his love lyrics. In "Songs and Sonets," idealistic and cynical attitudes toward love are juxtaposed, both within individual works and in the collection as a whole. Donne characteristically rejects neoplatonic asceticism, but he sometimes expresses disgust with carnality.

The witty and passionate Donne is justly recognized as the late Renaissance's supreme poet of heterosexual love. Known in his youth as a ladies' man, he caused a scandal in 1601 by secretly marrying the niece of his employer, Lord Keeper Egerton, an indiscretion that led to his dismissal and brief imprisonment and that ruined his prospects for a career in public service. He fathered twelve children and eventually took holy orders in the Church of England. When he died in 1631, he had become Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, and the most famous preacher in the land.

Donne's contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage resides principally in a series of verse letters that he wrote as a young man and in a remarkable dramatic monologue in a lesbian voice, "Sapho to Philaenis." Homosexuality recurs in his satires and his epigrams, though usually as an object of scorn or humor. In "The Jughler," for example, he playfully deconstructs the ambiguous Renaissance word effeminate to poke fun at the sodomite: "Thou call'st me effeminat, for I love womens joyes; / I call not thee manly, though thou follow boyes." In the verse letters to "T.W." and in "Sapho to Philaenis," however, Donne takes seriously.

The four poems to "T.W." were probably written when Donne was eighteen years old and were likely addressed to Thomas Woodward, the sixteen-year-old brother of his friend and frequent correspondent Rowland Woodward. As George Klawitter has shown, the verse letters constitute a sequence that records, first, the poet's infatuation for his friend and, then, his severe disappointment when the youth fails to respond with a like ardor. The poems, including Woodward's response, are full of sexual puns and a highly charged homoeroticism.

"Sapho to Philaenis" is among the earliest positive portrayals of lesbian love in English. In it, the languishing Sapho celebrates the body of her absent lover as "a naturall Paradise, / In whose selfe, unmanur'd, all pleasure lies" (ll. 35-36). Donne challenges his culture's negative attitude toward homosexuality by figuring lesbianism as a utopian trope: "betweene us," Sapho tells Philaenis, "all sweetnesse may be had, / All, all that Nature yields, or Art can adde" (ll. 43-44). Indeed, as Janel Mueller observes, the poem "undertakes to imagine the pleasures, sustenance, and ideological implications by which lesbianism, as a mode of loving and being, resists patriarchal disposition and diminution of women."

Homosexuality is writ large in English Renaissance literature, but its inscription is only rarely direct and unambiguous.