Donne has been congratulated on writing on behalf of the human race. But this is an illusion. He writes as a male. The confusion between the word ‘man’ as denoting both ‘male’ and ’ humanity’ is germane to our culture, written into the English language and the cultural assumptions it enshrines and perpetuates. The male is privileged as spokesman for the tribe. Generations of critics — generally male, or women successful in the patriarchal academic world — have not only failed to locate and anatomize the problems of the sexualized vision Donne puts forward in his poetry but have actively colluded in his fantasies of omnivorous potency, preening their own maleness in the glamorized light in which he (on occasions) gilds viciousness and denies the sublimated problems which are the real and fascinating subjects of certain poems. As an undergraduate in the late 1960s I was told that Donne's ‘muscular and powerful’ style was ‘masculine’, in contrast to the more ‘feminine’ smoothness of the Spenserians: obediently, we all inscribed this wisdom, excited no doubt by the sheer sexuality of the love-poems into an amiable blindness to the deeper implications both of their power and of that of its exponents. The image of Donne in early life as a jaunty, philandering rake is one which a body of his earlier texts, including some of the Songs and Sonets, Elegies, and Satires, exhibit with pride: critics have tended either to smirk collusively or to tolerate these literary ‘wild oats’, sown with such brilliant wit. Latterly John Carey has outdone them all in an otherwise brilliant book by a kind of swashbuckling phallicism: ‘We are careful to talk, nowadays, as if we believed the male ought to respect the female's individuality. Donne is above such hypocrisies …’ (Carey, 100). Carey is to be thanked for his self-exposing candour: he clarifies the common assumption that ‘we’ (man) are all ‘men’ (males). Misogyny is accepted or applauded by the critical tradition as a performance art. And indeed there is no doubt that Donne does it very well.

I have queried the relationship of biography and poetry, proposing a scepticism appropriate to Donne's own. But one personal fact cannot be dismissed from a reading of his works and that is the fact of gender.