John Donne - Donne in Literature

Donne in Literature

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 is featured prominently in a number of Gwen Harwood's poems, including "A Valediction" and "The Sharpness of Death".