John Donne rose from abject poverty to become Dean of St Pauls, and from being an unknown figure whose poetry was so erotic that it could only be circulated manuscript to being a distinguished man of the Church deeply uneasy to remember the sins of his youth. The confident of King James and King Charles, for the following two centuries and more following his death though his sermons (among the finest prose writing of the seventeenth century) were revered, his poetry was neglected. The twentieth century however began to recognise his virtues, and he is now properly regarded as a major English writer – some critics would say the greatest English poet and prose-writer of his time..