11 - Donne as preacher

Summary

At his death in 1631, John Donne was popularly famous not as a poet, but as a preacher. Even the elegists marshalled to praise Donne in the first editions of the collected Poems (1633, 1635) lauded his preaching, not his poetry. Indeed, the author of a dedicatory epigram to the printer of Poems was bold to say, ''Yet shew I thee a better way; / Print but his Sermons, and if those we buy, / He, We, and Thou shall live t' Eternity.'' This petition was soon granted. Six of Donne's sermons had already appeared in print during his lifetime, including two by royal command, followed quickly by Donne's last sermon, Deaths Duell. Then in folios published in 1640, 1649, and 1661 by John Donne, Jr., there appeared the 156 sermons that still form the basis of the sermon canon (see Sermons, vol. X, pp. 402-09). There was little doubt in the seventeenth-century mind that eloquence used for preaching was infinitely superior to penning ephemera like poems. Yet modern taste has inverted these early modern priorities. Donne's sermons have been used primarily either as convenient thematic glosses on the poetry, or for biographical evidence about Donne's theology, politics, and personality. Formal criticism has tended to praise them only when, in selected passages, they approach modern notions of ''the poetic.'' To appreciate properly Donne's sermons requires students first to acquaint themselves with what they are formally and generically.