Episode Details

John Donne wrote the most explicitly erotic poetry in the English language — and then became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, preaching sermons of such power that congregations wept. The transformation from rakish young poet to thundering divine is one of the most dramatic reinventions in literary history, driven by a secret marriage that destroyed his career and a religious conversion that rebuilt it.

This episode traces Donne from the Catholic recusant childhood through the erotic poetry, the secret marriage that ruined him, the religious conversion, and the sermons and devotional poems that made him the greatest metaphysical poet in English.

• The Catholic childhood in Protestant England and the religious danger that shadowed his youth
• The erotic poetry — "The Flea," the Elegies — that made him London's most talked-about young writer
• The secret marriage to Ann More, the imprisonment, and the career destruction that followed
• "Death, be not proud," the Devotions, and the transformation into England's most powerful preacher