John Donne and the Psychology of Death The seventeenth-century poet John Donne has gone down in the history of popular culture for three lines: “No man is an island,” “Ask not for whom the bell tolls -- it tolls for thee”, and the opening of a poem called “Death be not proud”. This last came from a collection of Donne’s poems which came to be called the “Holy Sonnets.” The name is possibly misleading, for it leads people to suppose that he wrote them after he became an ordained preacher. However, he actually wrote these several years before, when he was going through a severe and almost incapacitating depression. During this time Donne seems to have been