John Donne – soldier, lawyer, jailbird (for marrying a 16 y.o), Member of Parliament and Dean of St Paul's, the 'Monarch of Wit', pungent, rough and conversational, 'a great visitor of the ladies', possessed of an animal eroticism, and second only to William Shakespeare as a poet of love, rule-breaker both in life and art, intricately argumentative while subtle and knotty , powerfully physical in his verse with a 'sensuous apprehension of thought' (Eliot), and possibly the greatest dispenser of dazzling wordplay in the language.