John Donne is of course famous for his incendiary poetry; informal, biting, passionate, knotty bundles of brilliance that mostly originated as songs written for friends. Yet this is very much a modern view, the result in fact of a fan campaign by T. S. Eliot. In his lifetime, quite another Donne dominated the conversations of courtiers across the capital. In his later career as Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr. Donne’s fame stretched across Europe. His sermons were mesmerising, astonishing riffs on Biblical verses or current affairs, delivered with astonishing power to congregations in their thousands. Over two hundred of the texts survive, and in the three centuries following his death in 1631 it was on them that his reputation rested. He was an orator without equal. In recent years it is becoming increasingly clear from detailed analysis of the texts that he was also a theologian of some originality. Indeed, there currently are signs that before long his modern reputation may swing once again – from poet to philosopher.

Donne believed that every living thing was a mirror of everything else; that we all breathe in symmetry with each other, all an echo of the mind of God. This was a view unusual for the period and was influenced by his reading of Greek and Jewish mysticism. Like his younger next-door neighbour John Milton, Donne read everything available in print at the time, and in several languages. When new books arrived from the continent, Donne was among the first to see them. He was the first man in London to read Galileo, and he embraced the new science entirely, even corresponding with Johannes Kepler in Germany. Not only was Donne expert in science and theology; he was a learned lawyer, twice member of parliament, sometime soldier and dabbler in the theatre. His son-in- law was Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare’s star actor, and he was tangentially involved in the extravagant masques presented at the court of King James.

Donne’s biography, too, was the stuff almost of legend in the seventeenth century. He was born a Catholic in a time when it was illegal, and ended his life as one of the greatest Protestant clerics. His mother’s family was descended from Thomas More and bore their inheritance with pride; More’s decapitated head was a family heirloom. Donne’s early life was marked with disgrace and scandal: he was a supporter of the rebellious Earl of Essex, who attempted to depose Elizabeth I, and he was a notable philanderer who eloped with the teenage daughter of a highly conservative aristocrat, and was thrown in jail as a result. For years, he and his wife lived in foetid poverty in the wilds of Croydon. Yet by middle-age he had become a frequent confidant of the king and his moral counsel was listened to with great attention.

Donne had many identities throughout his life, and only minor among them was poet. He was London’s Renaissance man. Along with his friends Inigo Jones and Francis Bacon he was one of the few Englishmen to equal in achievement the great Italian polymaths of the age. His was a restless, uncompromising and ever-inquisitive mind, reflected in his urgent, impatient, dazzling writing. So extraordinary was his life that a few years after it ended it became the subject of the first biography written in English, by his friend Izaak Walton.

He was also wholly a Londoner, born deep within the city and pining whenever he was forced to leave it. He was pastor of two adjacent parishes in the city and helped out with others. His influence extended from St. Paul’s, down Ludgate Hill and along the Strand to Charing Cross (almost the breadth of London at the time). The Thames features in more verse by Donne than by any other notable English poet before or since. Arguably, among prominent English authors, only Dickens was influenced more by the life of the capital than was Donne.

John Donne is anomalous among the great figures of English literature because we are still trying to work out exactly where that greatness lies. His poems are extraordinary, but we are beginning to understand just how many were actually songs, which is rather like discovering that all those texts by Shakespeare are actually plays. It changes how you read them. After ignoring his sermons for most of the last, very secular, century, we are beginning to see once again their brilliance. His prose writing, too, which includes the first printed defence of suicide in English, is undergoing a revaluation. It may be that his life and work have been just a little too

colourful, a bit too continental, for the cautious and sceptical tastes of modern English scholarship, but hopefully this, too, is changing. If so, it will be for the best, for there is nothing like Donne’s work in our language – he is unique, and his dazzling and punchy brilliance is without rival. We should treasure him.

Into Thy Hands, Jonathan Holmes’s play about Donne, is on at Wilton’s Music Hall from 31 May – 2 July 2011. For tickets, visit www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing or call the Barbican on 020 7638 8891