Donne, Castiglione and the Poetry of Courtliness

Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of CourtlinessPeter DeSa Wiggins The influence of The Book of the Courtier on the work of John Donne. John Donne has been described as a "poet of ambition," who used his poems as agents in his quest for preferment among the elites of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. Until now the extent of the influence on Donne's work of that era's most influential court text -- Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier -- has never been fully explored. Courtier was Elizabeth