12 - Donne’s language: the conditions of communication

Summary

While no one would dispute that Donne was a man of many abilities, it is clear that Donne's linguistic gift was his principal talent and his most significant asset. He may have come from a good family, but he inherited neither property nor titles. He absorbed himself in learning, but while law, medicine, astronomy, and other new sciences provided material for his verbal creativity in poetry and prose, he is not remembered for any distinctive contribution to knowledge. He is remembered as a preacher, but does not figure as an important theologian. What he had was an exceptional verbal ability: the ''talent'' he could most readily put out to ''use'' was his linguistic capital. It is what enabled his poetry, his sexual conquests, his literary friendships, his relative success as a secretary, his access to patrons like the Countess of Bedford, his notice by King James, and his power to preach sermons with the golden tongue of St. Chrysostom. His tongue probably also got him into lots of trouble - witness the cockiness of his first letter to Sir George More after eloping with his daughter, which helped to land him in prison; Sir Thomas Egerton's reported satisfaction, after Donne was forced out of his service, with an inferior secretary who was not so clever at finding things to correct in his dictation or written drafts; Donne's concern about potential political danger if his Satires were to be published and the actual brief scare when a sermon preached in 1627 offended Charles I.