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The seventeenth-century poet John Donne has gone down in the history of popular culture for three lines: “No man is an island,” “Ask not for whom the bell tolls -- it tolls for thee”, and the opening of a poem called “Death be not proud”. This ....

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... Death. According to Ian Ousby, writing in the Wordsworth Companion to English Literature, “Much of Donne’s poetry confronted the theme of death. In his Holy Sonnets, mostly written before he was ordained, there is the memorable poem beginning “Death be not proud” and he was also the author of two notable poems commemorating the death of Elizabeth Drury, the daughter of his friend and patron. . . . Generally regarded as the foremost of the metaphysical poets, Donne was always an uneven writer. His secular poems were original, energetic, and highly rhetorical, full of passionate thought and intellectual juggling. . . . His adroitness in argu ...