secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton seemed at last to have opened the door to Donne's ambition, but his elopement with Anne More in 1601 closed it again abruptly, and years of disappointment and suffering, dependence on patrons and free-lance work in controversy, led him inevitably, after some delays, to holy orders in 1615, and a life as severely ascetic and pious as his earlier had been adventurous. But the fame of the eloquent preacher never quite eclipsed that of the poet.
Donne's poems—with the exception of his elegies on Mistress Elizabeth Drury, The Anatomy of the Works. World—were not printed until after his death, and it is accordingly difficult to determine their order with accuracy. His Satires—the most interesting and, metrically, the most irregular of the late sixteenth-century work of this kind—may date from 1593, but the earliest unmistakable reference is to 1597. To his first years in town belong probably the more frankly sensuous and cynical of the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets. Those which strike a higher and more Platonic note may have been written after his engagement to Anne More. The satirical Progress of the Soul dates from 1601. The courtly and adulatory Epithalamia, Verse-Letters, Epicedes and Obsequies, as well as the Divine Poems, were the product of his later and more regular years.
Amorous and satirical, courtly, pious, these are the successive phases of Donne's life and poetry,—poetry in which the imaginative, emancipated spirit of the Renaissance came into abrupt contact, and blended in the strangest way with the
