Strong, sensual style. Sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. 

His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems.

Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a world populated by all the fools and knaves of England. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught  this."

Development of a more somber and pious tone in his later poems. The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. His early belief in the value of scepticism now gave way to a firm faith in the traditional teachings of the Bible.

John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech.

Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death), and religion.

Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early twentieth century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F R Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.

John Donne  was born in London, England.  Despite his relgious calling (he was Dean of St, Pauls Cathedral in London)his poetry is notable for it eroticism and sometimes cynical worldview, as well as for its striking imagery.He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. 

The loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.

Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint Bartholomew`s day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the persecuted minority. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Donne`s personal relationship with religion was tumultuous and passionate, and at the center of much of his poetry. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in his early teen years. He did not take a degree at either school, because to do so would have meant subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, the doctrine that defined Anglicanism. 

At age twenty he studied law at Lincoln`s Inn. Two years later he succumbed to religious pressure and joined the Anglican Church after his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic loyalties, died in prison. 

Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590`s, creating two major volumes of work: 

Satires, and Songs and Sonnets. 

In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Edgarton. While sitting on Queen Elizabeth`s last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Edgarton. Donne`s father-in-law disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned. This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and patrons. 

Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children. 

He continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife, aged thirty-three, died in 1617, shortly after giving birth to their twelfth child, a stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of his life. 

In 1621 he became dean of Saint Paul`s Cathedral. In his later years, Donne`s writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox, John Donne died in London in 1631. 

The Works of John Donne

Poetry

Satires (1593) 

Songs and Sonnets (1601) 

Divine Poems Divine Poems (1607) 

Psevdo-Martyr (1610) 

Ignatius his Conclaue (1611) 

An Anatomy of the World (1611) 

The Second Anniuersarie. Of The Progres of the Soule (1611) 

An Anatomie of the World (1612) 

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) 

Deaths Dvell (1632) 

Ivvenilia (1633) 

Poems (1633) 

Sapientia Clamitans (1638) 

Wisdome crying out to Sinners (1639) 

Prose

Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651) Edited by John Donne, Jr. Facsimile, with introduction by M. Thomas Hester. 

A Collection of Letters, Made by Sr Tobie Mathews, Kt. (1660) Edited by John Donne, Jr. 

Essays

A Sermon Vpon The XV. Verse Of The XX. Chapter Of The Booke Of Ivdges (1622) 

A Sermon Vpon The VIII. Verse Of The I. Chapter of The Acts Of The Apostles (1622) 

Encania. The Feast of Dedication. Celebrated At Lincolnes Inne, in a Sermon there upon Ascension day (1623) 

Three Sermons Upon Speciall Occasions (1623) 

The First Sermon Preached To King Charles (1625) 

Fovre Sermons Upon Speciall Occasions (1625) 

A Sermon, Preached To The Kings Mtie. At Whitehall (1625) 

Five Sermons Vpon Speciall Occasions (1626) 

A Sermon Of Commemoration Of The Lady Dãuers (1627) 

Six Sermons Vpon Severall Occasions (1634) 

LXXX Sermons (1640) 

Biathanatos: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis that Selfe-homicide is not so (1644) 

Naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise (1647) 

Essayes in Divinity (1651)