We're never done with Donne, are we?

https://apenglishp3.wikispaces.com/The+Flea 

Dear Charlie,
We've just started working on John Donne.
 And I imagine that you'll not be surprised that I have to deal with a slight amount of dismay on the students' part when I try to convince that John Donne is not just old, stuffy, difficult. 
I agree , John Donne is challenging in many ways. 
First of all he is quite controversial ( and that should appeal to you teenagers always ready for a bit of challenge) but also even if his poetry and the language in which it's written are not always the easiest to grasp, rising up to the challenge will be so invigorating! 

Besides, Donne's actually quite hype and his poetry is everywhere.  

He is is of course a key reference for many poets 

TS. Eliot was a great admirer of his, wrote about him quite a lot and mentioned him in one of his poems, Whispers of Immortality
http://www.bartleby.com/199/22.html
But Sylvia Plath was also frequently compared to him.





Sylvia Plath, interviewed on BBC Radio in late 1962, said the following about a book review of her collection of poems titled The Colossus and Other Poems that had been published in the United Kingdom two years earlier: "I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne but not quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I felt the weight of English literature on me at that point."

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htm


But not only.....

" For Whom the Bell tolls" (Meditation 17 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions) serves as the opening for Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, and also produces the book's title.

By the way, I recommend both the novel and its  film adaptation
A great classic by Sam Wood with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. 

It is also the title of a song by Metallica

 and a song by the Bee Gees

"No man is an island" (MEDITATION XVII: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)

is a key "philosophical" moment  in About a Boy by Nick Hornby and in its film adaptation by  Chris and Paul Weitz with Hugh Grant.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276751/quotes

It  has also become the title of a song, by Bon Jovi (mentioned in the film) 
and a song by  by Tenth Avenue North

If you are a fantasy fan, did you know that Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star inspired Diana Wynne Jones  for her novel Howl's Moving 
Castle , you might have read it or seen the Japanese animation by Hayao Miyazaki. based on it

 but also Stardust by Neil Gaiman and its film adaptationby Matthew Vaughn with Claire Danes 

To conclude, a couplet that John Donne inspired me;

"John Donne can be done
And it can be fun"
CASE MADE. 
Mrs. C