I’m having a little trouble reconciling the heavily implied eroticism of Donne’s poetry with his supposedly unassailable piety. In Izaac Walton’s biography of Donne, Walton makes the poet appear as a sort of bastion of Anglican beliefs and practices – practices that proponents of the Church of England often contrasted with the more “sensual” elements of worship in Catholicism. The Norton biography of Donne also points out that Donne only took his position of leadership at St. Paul’s, which he had been holding off on doing, due to his dire financial circumstances. This reluctance, in combination with the subjects of much of his oeuvre, might lead one to question how much of a model of English protestantism of the period Donne truly was.