John Donne - Donne in Popular Culture

Donne in Popular Culture

  • John Renbourn, on his 1966 debut album John Renbourn, sings a version of the poem, "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star". (He alters the last line to "False, ere I count one, two, three.")
  • Tarwater, in their album Salon des Refusés, have put "The Relic" to song.
  • The plot of Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust is based upon the poem "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star," with the fallen star turned into a major character.
  • One of the major plotlines of Diana Wynne Jones' novel Howl's Moving Castle is based upon the poem "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star," with each of the lines in the poem coming true or being fulfilled by the main male character.
  • Bob Chilcott has arranged a choral piece to Donne's "Go and Catch a Falling Star".
  • Van Morrison pays tribute to the poet in "Rave On John Donne" from his album "Poetic Champions Compose" and makes references in many other songs.
  • Lost in Austen, the British mini series based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, has Bingley refer to Donne when he describes taking Jane to America, "John Donne, don't you know? 'License my roving hands,' and so forth."
  • Las Cruces, in their album Ringmaster, used a sample of "Death be not Proud" from the movie The Exorcist III for their song "Black Waters".
  • In the beginning of the movie About a Boy, the quiz show mentions 'No man is an island', asking the competitors who coined the phrase. John Donne is one of the answers and is of course, the correct answer. Hugh Grant, the main character, turns on the TV before viewers are given the answer, and he himself answers the question incorrectly.
  • In the computer game The Walking Dead, one of the side characters, Chuck, uses the quote "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee" from Donne's poem 'No man is an island', before the group is overrun by walkers.

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Famous quotes containing the words donne, popular and/or culture:

    But our old subtle foe so tempteth me
    That not one hour I can myself sustain.
    Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
    And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.
    —John Donne (1572–1631)

    People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
    Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)