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Antoine Wiertz
Self portrait,1860
Born	(1806-02-22)22 February 1806 Dinant
Died	18 June 1865(1865-06-18) (aged 59) Brussels
Nationality	Belgian
Field	Painting
Movement	Romanticism, Symbolism
Works	The Suicide, Deux jeunes filles (La Belle Rosine)

Antoine Joseph Wiertz (22 February 1806 – 18 June 1865) was a Belgian romantic painter and sculptor.

Biography[link]

Born in Dinant from a relatively poor family, he entered the Antwerp art academy in 1820. Thanks to his protector Pierre-Joseph de Paul de Maibe, a member of the Second Chamber of the States-General, king William I of the Netherlands awarded an annual stipend to Wiertz from 1821 onwards. Between November 1829 and May 1832, he stayed in Paris, where he studied the old masters at the Louvre.

In 1828, Wiertz took part in the Grand Concours, also known as Concours de Rome, but came out only second. He landed the prestigious Prix de Rome only at his second attempt in 1832, which enabled him to go to Rome, where he resided from May 1834 until February 1837. Upon his return, he established himself in Liège with his mother.

During his stay in Rome, Wiertz worked on his first great work, Les Grecs et les Troyens se disputant le corps de Patrocle ("Greeks and Trojans fighting for the body of Patrocles", finished in 1836), on a subject borrowed from canto XVII of Homer's Iliad. It was exhibited in Antwerp in 1837, where it met with some success. Wiertz submitted the work for the Paris Salon of 1838, but it arrived too late and was refused.

At the Paris Salon of 1839, Wiertz showed not only his Patrocles, but also three other works: Madame Laetitia Bonaparte sur son lit de mort ("Madame Laetitia Bonaparte on her deathbed"), La Fable des trois souhaits—Insatiabilité humaine ("The fable of the three wishes—Human insatiability") and Le Christ au tombeau ("Christ entombed"). Badly hung and lit, his entry elicited indifference on the part of the public, and provoked sarcasm among the critics. This second humiliation led to a profound rancour against art critics and against Paris, as expressed in his virulent pamphlet Bruxelles capitale, Paris province.

In 1844, Wiertz painted a second version of his Patrocles on an even bigger scale than the first (the 1836 version measures 3.85m by 7.03m; the 1844 version 5.20m by 8.52). The Rome version is now in the Museum of Walloon Art in Liège, the 1844 in the Wiertz Museum in Brussels.

After the Paris disaster, Wiertz veered more and more to the excessive. A fine example is the monumental La Chute des Anges rebelles ("The Fall of the rebellious Angels", 1841), on an arched canvas of 11.53m by 7.93m.

The death of his mother in 1844 was a terrible blow to the artist. He left Liège in 1845 to settle in Brussels for good. During this period he painted a confrontation of Beauty and Death, Deux jeunes filles—La Belle Rosine (1847), which remains perhaps his most famous work.

Deux jeunes filles (La Belle Rosine), Oil on canvas, 1847

Dissatisfied with the shiny effect of oil painting, he developed a new technique combining the smoothness of oil painting with the speed of execution and the dullness of painting in fresco. This technique of mat painting entailed the use of a mixture of colours, turpentine and petrol on holland. La Lutte homérique ("The Homeric struggle", 1853) was the first big-scale painting executed in this technique. However, the components used in this technique are responsible for the slow decay of the works produced with it.

L'Inhumation précipitée, 1854, depicts a cholera victim awakening after being placed in a coffin.

The Young Sorceress

Many of his works from the 1850s have a social of philosophical message, often translated in delirious imagery, like Faim, Folie et Crime ("Hunger, Madness and Crime", 1853), La Liseuse de Romans ("The Reader of Novels", 1853), Le Suicide ("The Suicide", 1854), L'Inhumation précipitée ("The premature burial", 1854), Le Dernier Canon ("The last gun", 1855).

Wiertz was also a fine portrait painter, who made self-portraits at various ages. As a sculptor, he produced his most important project towards the end of his life: a series of plasters representing Les Quatre Âges de l'Humanité ("The Four Ages of Humanity", 1860–1862), reproduced in marble for the Wiertz museum by Auguste Franck.

After difficult negotiations with the Belgian government, Wiertz was able to realize his dream to turn his last studio into a museum for his works. The Belgian State bought a piece of land and funded the construction of a huge hall to accommodate the painter's monumental works. In exchange, Wiertz donated all his works to the Belgian State, with the express proviso that they should remain in his studio both during and after his lifetime.

Wiertz died in his studio. His remains were embalmed in accordance with Ancient Egyptian burial rites and buried in a vault in the municipal cemetery of Ixelles.

Influenced mainly by Rubens and the late Michelangelo, Wiertz' monumental painting often moves between classical academism and lurid romanticism, between the grandiose and the ridiculous. Although his work was often derided as art pompier, his pictorial language nevertheless preannounced symbolism and a certain kind of surrealism, two currents that would be very strong in Belgian painting.

A copy of one of Antoine Wiertz's works, the statue of The Triumph of Light was once prominently located high on San Francisco's Mount Olympus between the Haight-Ashbury and Corona Heights. It had been presented to the city of San Francisco by Adolph Sutro in 1887. Over the years due to lack of care and maintenance the statue fell into disrepair. By the late 1930s, even the history and origins of the statue were no longer common knowledge in San Francisco, and by the mid 1950s, the statue disappeared. All that remains today is the pedestal and base of the monument.^[1]

Wiertz Museum[link]

Wiertz Museum in Brussels, as of 2006

The Antoine Wiertz Museum is now one of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.^[2] It is located in the Leopold district of Brussels, near the Luxembourg railway station, today overshadowed by the European Parliament complex. The Rue Wiertz runs from the museum through the Parliament complex, in an unintended echo of Wiertz' call for Brussels to become the capital of Europe.

Contemporary opinions of the museum and the works therein are mixed:

• "[The museum] is devoted to the works of one of the city's most distinctive, if disagreeable, nineteenth-century artists."^[3]
• "If you're into the shocking or nasty, it [the museum] may appeal."^[4]
• "In recent years the Wiertz Museum has attracted an average of just ten visitors a day ... The Belgian state is legally stuck with all 220 of his [Wiertz'] works—dreadful though most of them are—and an obligation to display them forever. ... [Wiertz was] perhaps the worst painter to have a government-funded museum all to himself, at least in the free world ..."^[5]

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Antoine Wiertz

• Antoine Wiertz: Belgian Romantic by Jeffery Howe
• Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Catalogue: Antoine Wiertz
• Artcyclopedia
• Biography of Antoine Wiertz

Richard Le Gallienne (20 January 1866 – 15 September 1947) was an English author and poet. The American actress Eva Le Gallienne (1899–1991) was his daughter, by his second marriage.

Life and career[link]

He was born in Liverpool. He started work in an accountant's office, but abandoned this job to become a professional writer. The book My Ladies' Sonnets appeared in 1887, and in 1889 be became for a brief time literary secretary to Wilson Barrett.

He joined the staff of the newspaper The Star in 1891, and wrote for various papers by the name Logroller. He contributed to The Yellow Book, and associated with the Rhymers' Club.

His first wife, Mildred Lee, died in 1894, and in 1897 he married Julie Noiregard, subsequently becoming a resident of the United States. They divorced a few years later. He has been credited with the 1906 translation from the Danish of Peter Nansen's Love's Trilogy;^[1] but most sources and the book itself attribute it to Julie.

In later times he knew Llewelyn Powys and John Cowper Powys.

Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest the stress was "on the last syllable: le gal-i-enn'. As a rule I hear it pronounced as if it were spelled 'gallion,' which, of course, is wrong." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)

A number of his works are now available online.

Works[link]

• My Ladies' Sonnets and Other Vain and Amatorious Verses (1887)
• Volumes in Folio (1889) poems
• George Meredith: Some Characteristics (1890)
• The Book-Bills of Narcissus (1891)
• English Poems (1892)
• The Religion of a Literary Man (1893)
• Robert Louis Stevenson: An Elegy and Other Poems (1895)
• Quest of the Golden Girl (1896) novel
• Prose Fancies (1896)
• Retrospective Reviews (1896)
• Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1897)
• If I Were God (1897)
• The Romance Of Zion Chapel (1898)
• In Praise of Bishop Valentine (1898)
• Young Lives (1899)
• Sleeping Beauty and Other Prose Fancies (1900)
• The Worshipper Of The Image (1900)
• The Love Letters of the King, or The Life Romantic (1901)
• An Old Country House (1902)
• Odes from the Divan of Hafiz (1903) translation
• Old Love Stories Retold (1904)
• Painted Shadows (1904)
• Romances of Old France (1905)
• Little Dinners with the Sphinx and other Prose Fancies (1907)
• Omar Repentant (1908)
• Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (1909) Translator
• Attitudes and Avowals (1910) essays
• October Vagabonds (1910)
• New Poems (1910)
• The Maker of Rainbows and Other Fairy-Tales and Fables (1912)
• The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems (1913)
• Vanishing Roads and Other Essays (1915)
• The Silk-Hat Soldier and Other Poems in War Time (1915)
• The Chain Invisible (1916)
• Pieces of Eight (1918)
• The Junk-Man and Other Poems (1920)
• A Jongleur Strayed (1922) poems
• Woodstock: An Essay (1923)
• The Romantic '90s (1925) memoirs
• The Romance of Perfume (1928)
• There Was a Ship (1930)
• From a Paris Garret (1936) memoirs
• The Diary of Samuel Pepys (editor)

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Le Gallienne)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Le Gallienne

• Works by Richard Le Gallienne at Project Gutenberg

References[link]

• The Quest of the Golden Boy (1960) Geoffrey Smerdon and Richard Whittington-Egan
• Richard Le Gallienne: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology (1966) Clarence Decker
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2010)

John Donne
John Donne
Born	between 24 January and 19 June 1572[1] London, England
Died	31 March 1631 (aged 59) London, England
Occupation	Poet, priest, lawyer
Nationality	English
Alma mater	Oxford University
Genres	Satire, Love poetry, elegy, sermons
Subjects	Love, sexuality, religion, death
Literary movement	Metaphysical Poetry
Influences William Shakespeare
Influenced W. B. Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, Seán Ó Ríordáin, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden[2]

John Donne ( /ˈdʌn/ DUN) (between 24 January and 19 June 1572^[1] – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and priest. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of British society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne’s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and theorising about. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.^[3]

Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne Moore, with whom he had twelve children.^[4] In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders. He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a member of parliament in 1601 and in 1614.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595. Artist unknown. In the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.^[5]

Donne was born in London, into a Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England.^[6] Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. Donne's father was a respected Roman Catholic who avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of persecution.^[7][8]

Donne's father died in 1576, leaving his wife, Elizabeth Heywood, the responsibility of raising their children.^[1] Elizabeth was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator.^[1] She was a great-niece of the Roman Catholic martyr Thomas More.^[1] This tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donne’s closer relatives, many of whom were executed or exiled for religious reasons.^[9] Donne was educated privately; however, there is no evidence to support the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits.^[1] Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children, a few months after Donne's father died. Two more of his sisters, Mary and Katherine, died in 1581. Donne's mother, who had lived in the Deanery after Donne became Dean of St. Paul's, survived him, dying in 1632 [1].

Part of the house where John Donne lived in Pyrford.

Donne was a student at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford, from the age of 11. After three years at Oxford he was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years.^[10] He was unable to obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he could not take the Oath of Supremacy required of graduates.^{[citation needed]}

In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London.^[1] On 6 May 1592 he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, one of the Inns of Court.^[1] His brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, whom Henry betrayed under torture.^[6] Harrington was tortured on the rack, hanged until not quite dead, then was subjected to disembowelment.^[6] Henry Donne died in Newgate prison of bubonic plague, leading John Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.^[8]

During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel.^[7] Although there is no record detailing precisely where he travelled, it is known that he travelled across Europe and later fought with the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597) and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe.^[1][11] According to Izaak Walton, who wrote a biography of Donne in 1658:

... he returned not back into England till he had stayed some years, first in Italy, and then in Spain, where he made many useful observations of those countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned perfect in their languages.

—Izaak Walton^[12]

By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking.^[11] He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton’s London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.

Marriage to Anne More[link]

During the next four years, he fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More. They were married just before Christmas^[6] in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower and Anne's father. This wedding ruined Donne's career and earned him a short stay in Fleet Prison, along with Samuel Brooke, who married them,^[13] and the man who acted as a witness to the wedding. Donne was released when the marriage was proven valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.

After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in Pyrford, Surrey.^[1][14] Over the next few years, he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, depending on his wife’s cousin Sir Francis Wolly to house him, his wife, and their children. Because Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year, this was a very generous gesture. Though he practised law and may have worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity, with a growing family to provide for.^[1]

Anne bore twelve children in sixteen years of marriage (including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child); indeed, she spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing. The ten surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Francis, Nicholas, and Mary died before they were ten. In a state of despair, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one less mouth to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote, but did not publish, Biathanatos, his defence of suicide.^[9] His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby.^[1] Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet.

Career and later life[link]

Donne was elected as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Brackley in 1602, but this was not a paid position.^[1] The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave him a means to seek patronage and many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially Sir Robert Drury, who came to be Donne's chief patron in 1610.^[11] Donne wrote the two Anniversaries, An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul, (1612), for Drury. In 1610 and 1611 he wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius his Conclave.^[1] Although James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders.^[8] At length, Donne acceded to the King's wishes and in 1615 was ordained into the Church of England.^[11]

A few months before his death, Donne commissioned this portrait of himself as he expected to appear when he rose from the grave at the Apocalypse.^[15] He hung the portrait on his wall as a reminder of the transience of life.

Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge in 1615 and became a Royal Chaplain in the same year, and was made a Reader of Divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616.^[1] In 1618 he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was on an embassy to the princes of Germany. Donne did not return to England until 1620.^[14] In 1621 Donne was made Dean of St Paul's, a leading (and well-paid) position in the Church of England and one he held until his death in 1631. During his period as Dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen. In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combination of a cold followed by a period of fever. During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness that were published as a book in 1624 under the title of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. One of these meditations, Meditation XVII, later became well known for its phrase "for whom the bell tolls" and the statement that "no man is an island". In 1624 he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I.^[1] He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher and 160 of his sermons have survived, including the famous Death’s Duel sermon delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631.

Death[link]

It is thought that his final illness was stomach cancer, although this has not been proven. He died on 31 March 1631 having written many poems, most only in manuscript. Donne was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him was erected (carved from a drawing of him in his shroud), with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. Donne's monument survived the 1666 fire, and is on display in the present building.^[16]

Writings[link]

Early poetry[link]

Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a world populated by all the fools and knaves of England. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this."^[9]

Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex.^[11] In Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed, he poetically undressed his mistress and compared the act of fondling to the exploration of America. In Elegy XVIII, he compared the gap between his lover's breasts to the Hellespont.^[11] Donne did not publish these poems, although did allow them to circulate widely in manuscript form.^[11]

Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain, and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more somber and pious tone in his later poems.^[11] The change can be clearly seen in "An Anatomy of the World" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the Fall of Man and the destruction of the universe.^[11]

The poem "A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day", concerns the poet's despair at the death of a loved one. In it Donne expresses a feeling of utter negation and hopelessness, saying that "I am every dead thing...re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death." This famous work was probably written in 1627 when both Donne's friend Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and his daughter Lucy Donne died. Three years later, in 1630, Donne wrote his will on Saint Lucy's day (13 December), the date the poem describes as "Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight."

The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. His early belief in the value of scepticism now gave way to a firm faith in the traditional teachings of the Bible. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne focused his literary career on religious literature. He quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. The lines of these sermons would come to influence future works of English literature, such as Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, which took its title from a passage in Meditation XVII of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island, which took its title from the same source.

Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, Death Be Not Proud, from which come the famous lines “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death’s Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death, yet sees hope in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.^[9][11][18]

Style[link]

His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the Metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by the critic Dr Johnson, following a comment on Donne by the poet John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."^[19] In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early twentieth century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F R Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.^[20]

Donne's work suggests a healthy appetite for life and its pleasures, while also expressing deep emotion. He did this through the use of conceits, wit and intellect—as seen in the poems "The Sun Rising" and "Batter My Heart".

Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery.^[9] An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in "The Canonization". Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" where he compares two lovers who are separated to the two legs of a compass.

Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death), and religion.^[9]

John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").^[9]

Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his Anniversaries which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.

Legacy[link]

Donne is commemorated as a priest in the calendar of the Church of England and in the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 31 March.^[21]

Sylvia Plath, interviewed on BBC Radio in late 1962, said the following about a book review of her collection of poems titled The Colossus that had been published in the United Kingdom two years earlier: "I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne but not quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I felt the weight of English literature on me at that point."^[22]

The memorial to Donne, modelled after the engraving pictured above, was one of the few such memorials to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and now appears in St Paul's Cathedral where Donne is buried.^[16]

Donne in literature[link]

Donne has appeared in several works of literature:

• In Margaret Edson's Pulitzer prize-winning play Wit (1999), the main character, a professor of 17th century poetry specialising in Donne, is dying of cancer. The play was adapted for the HBO film Wit starring Emma Thompson.
• Donne's Songs and Sonnets feature in The Calligrapher (2003), a novel by Edward Docx.
• In the 2006 novel The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, Donne's works are frequently quoted.
• Donne appears, along with his wife Anne and daughter Pegge, in the award-winning novel Conceit (2007) by Mary Novik.
• Joseph Brodsky has a poem called "Elegy for John Donne".
• The love story of Donne and Anne More is the subject of Maeve Haran's 2010 historical novel The Lady and the Poet.
• An excerpt from "Meditation 17 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions" serves as the opening for Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls.
• Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead makes several references to Donne's work.
• Donne is the favourite poet of Dorothy Sayers' fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey, and the Wimsey books include numerous quotations from, and allusions to, his work.
• Donne's poem 'A Fever' (incorrectly called 'The Fever') is mentioned in the penultimate paragraph of the novel "The Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris.
• Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran writes a paper on Donne in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History, in which he ties together Donne and Izaak Walton with help of an imaginary philosophy called "Metahemeralism".
• Donne plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's The Noble Assassin (2011), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and putative lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford.

Donne in popular culture[link]

• John Renbourn, on his 1966 debut album John Renbourn, sings a version of the poem, "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star". (He alters the last line to "False, ere I count one, two, three.")
• Tarwater, in their album Salon des Refusés, have put "The Relic" to song.
• The plot of Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust is based upon the poem "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star," with the fallen star turned into a major character.
• Bob Chilcott has arranged a choral piece to Donne's "Go and Catch a Falling Star".
• Van Morrison pays tribute to the poet on "Rave On John Donne" and makes references in many other songs.
• Lost in Austen, the British mini series based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, has Bingley refer to Donne when he describes taking Jane to America, "John Donne, don't you know? 'License my roving hands,' and so forth."
• Las Cruces, in their album Ringmaster, used a sample of "Death be not Proud" from the movie "Exorcist III" for their song "Black Waters".

Bibliography[link]

This section is incomplete. Please help to improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (January 2012)

• Biathanatos (1608)
• Pseudo-Martyr (1610)
• Ignatius His Conclave (1611)
• Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
• Songs and Sonnets (1633)

See also[link]

	Anglicanism portal
	Saints portal
	Poetry portal

Notes[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p} Colclough, ‘Donne, John (1572–1631)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, October 2007 oxforddnb.com, accessed 18 May 2010
2. ^ Donne, John. Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition
3. ^ Bookrags.com
4. ^ Luminarium.org
5. ^ The painting on the NPG's website.
6. ^ ^{a b c d} Schama, Simon (26 May 2009). "Simon Schama's John Donne". BBC2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo. Retrieved 18 June 2009. 
7. ^ ^{a b} "Donne, John" by Richard W. Langstaff. Article from Collier's Encyclopedia, Volume 8. Bernard Johnston, general editor. P.F. Colliers Inc., New York: 1988. pp. 346–349.
8. ^ ^{a b c} "Donne, John." Article in British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary. Edited by Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. The H.W. Wilson Company, New York: 1952. pp. 156–158
9. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth edition. W. W. Norton and Company, 2006. ISBN 0-393-92828-4; pp. 600–602.
10. ^ Venn, J.; Venn, J. A., eds. (1922–1958). "Donne, John". Alumni Cantabrigienses (10 vols) (online ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
11. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Will and Ariel Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part VII: The Age of Reason Begins. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1961. pp. 154–156.
12. ^ Walton, Izaak. The life of John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, and late Dean of Saint Pauls, pr. by J. G. for R. Marriot, 1658.
13. ^  "Brooke, Samuel". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 
14. ^ ^{a b} Jokinen, Anniina. "The Life of John Donne." Luminarium, 22 June 2006. Accessed 22 January 2007.
15. ^ Lapham, Lewis. The End of the World. Thomas Dunne Books: New York, 1997. p. 98.
16. ^ ^{a b} Cottrell, Dr Philip (University College Dublin). "The John Donne Monument (d. 1631) by Nicholas Stone". Church Monuments Society. http://churchmonumentssociety.org/Monument%20of%20the%20Month%20Archive/2010_11.html. Retrieved 27 April 2012. 
17. ^ The version of Meditation XVII found on wikiquote. Other sources change Donne's original orthography, phrasing and emphases, and have "...never ask for whom..."
18. ^ Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne's Thought by Terry G. Sherwood University of Toronto Press, 1984, p. 231
19. ^ Dryden, John, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (London, 1693)
20. ^ The Best Poems of the English Language. Harold Bloom. HarperCollins Publishers, New York: 2004. pp. 138–139.
21. ^ (PDF) Evangelical Lutheran Worship – Final Draft. Augsburg Fortress Press. 2006. http://www.renewingworship.org/ELW/content/PDF/ChurchYear_asm_20060119.pdf. 
22. ^ Voices and Visions television documentary episode about Sylvia Plath telecast on PBS for the first time on 14 August 1988. Her recollection of the book revewier comparing her to Donne is from an audio clip of one of her BBC radio appearances that she made in late 1962 after separating from her husband, poet Ted Hughes.

References[link]

• Bald, R. C. John Donne: A Life. (Oxford, 1970)
• Cleanth Brooks. "The Language of Paradox", Literary Theory: An Anthology 2nd edition; Julie Rivkan, Michael Ryan (eds) pp. 28–39 (2004)
• Colclough, David, John Donne's Professional Lives (Cambridge, 2003)
• Le Comte, Edward. Grace to a Witty Sinner: A Life of Donne, (Walker, 1965)
• Lim, Kit. John Donne: An Eternity of Song, Penguin, 2005.
• Morrissey, Mary, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558-1642 (Oxford, 2011)
• Stubbs, John. Donne: The Reformed Soul, Viking, 2006. ISBN 0-670-91510-6
• Sullivan Ceri The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan (Oxford, 2008)
• Walton, Izaak. The life of John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, and late Dean of Saint Pauls, pr. by J.G. for R.Marriot, 1658.
• Warnke, Frank J. John Donne, (U of Mass., Amherst 1987)

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: John Donne

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Donne

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Donne

• John Donne at archive.org
• Selected works (audio recordings) at LibriVox.org
• John Donne at Luminarium.org
• Poems by John Donne at PoetryFoundation.org
• John Donne's Monument, St Paul's Cathedral
• Homepage of the John Donne Society
• Complete sermons of John Donne
• John Donne: Sparknotes
• The Donne Variorum
• Digital Donne (digital images of early Donne editions and manuscripts)

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Félicien Rops
Detail from The Members of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts by Edmond Lambrichs
Born	(1833-07-07)7 July 1833 Namur
Died	23 August 1898(1898-08-23) (aged 65) Essonnes (present-day Corbeil-Essonnes)
Nationality	Belgian
Field	Printmaking, Etching
Training	University of Brussels
Movement	Symbolism and Decadence

Félicien Rops (7 July 1833 - 23 August 1898) was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.

Early life[link]

Rops was born in Namur, the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile.^[1] He was educated at the University of Brussels. Rops's forté was drawing more than painting in oils. He first won fame as a caricaturist.

In 1857, he married Charlotte Polet de Faveaux, with whom he had two children: Paul and Juliette. Juliette died at a young age.^[1]

After the failure of his marriage, he moved to Paris in 1874.^[2] There, he lived with the Duluc sisters: Aurélie and Léontine Duluc. With Léontine Duluc, he had one daughter, Claire.^[3] Claire went on to marry Belgian author Eugène Demolder.

Rops's eyesight began to fail in 1892. He kept up his literary associations until his death.

Félicien Rops was a freemason and a member of the Grand Orient of Belgium.^[4]

Relationship with Baudelaire[link]

Rops met Charles Baudelaire towards the end of the poet's life in 1864, and Baudelaire left an impression upon him that lasted until the end of his days.^[5] Rops created the frontispiece for Baudelaire's Les Épaves, a selection of poems from Les Fleurs du mal that had been censored in France, and which therefore were published in Belgium.

Rops's association with Baudelaire and with the art he represented won his work the admiration of many other writers, including Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Joséphin Péladan. He was closely associated with the literary movement of Symbolism and Decadence.

Art[link]

Like the works of the authors whose poetry he illustrated, his work tends to mingle sex, death, and Satanic images. Felicien Rops was one of the founding members of Société Libre des Beaux-Arts of Brussels (Free Society of Fine Arts, 1868–1876) and Les XX ("The Twenty," formed 1883).

• 

  Pornocrates (1896), etching and aquatint

• 

  Satan Sowing Seeds (from Les Sataniques, 1882)

• 

  The Temptation of
  St. Anthony (1878)

• 

  "The Sphinx", illustration by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly for Les Diaboliques

• 

  La Buveuse d'absinthe, 1877

• 

  Illustration du livre d'Octave Uzanne, Son altesse la femme (1885)

• 

  Human Parody

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (August 2009)

1. ^ ^{a b} Bonnier; Maliconi, N.; Carpiaux, V. "Félicien Rops Biography 1833-1861". http://www.museerops.be/biography/bio01.html. Retrieved 17 October 2011. 
2. ^ "Rops, Félicien". 21 March 2008. http://androom.home.xs4all.nl/biography/p022265.htm. Retrieved 17 October 2011. 
3. ^ "Félicien Rops Biography 1874-1888". http://www.museerops.be/biography/bio03.html. Retrieved 17 October 2011. 
4. ^ Felicien Rops "Félicien Rops (1833-1898)". http://www.mason.be/en/rop.htm Felicien Rops. Retrieved 21 August 2008. 
5. ^ "Biography of Félicien Rops". http://www.museerops.be/espace/documents/Biographie_Rops_EN.pdf. Retrieved 17 October 2011. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Félicien Rops

• The Musée Félicien Rops in Namur (English, French)
• Félicien Rops paintings