“I was bribed into loving John Donne. My parents pinned poetry on the bathroom wall next to the sink where my siblings and I brushed our teeth and paid us for each poem we memorized. I was a mercenary child, with expensive taste in small plastic dog figurines; the exchange rate was roughly four poems per dog, and so I learned a great deal of Donne. I learned, not realizing it at the time, some of the finest love poetry ever written in the English language.”
“I did not wholly understand the poems, but I understood that I loved them, for the way their vividness took root. And I know now that the poetry you learn as a child comes back to you as an adult. Two and a half decades later, I’m a fellow of All Souls College in Oxford, and I think that much of what attracted me to Donne was his insistence on our strangeness.”
