Oct 9, 2026
“No man is an island, entire of itself.” — John Donne | Quote Explained
A deep analysis of John Donne's 'No man is an island' — the 1623 illness that produced the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published in 1624, the passing bell that tolls at the end of Meditation XVII, why the passage is prose and not a poem, the original spelling 'No man is an Iland,' and the line's afterlife in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Thomas Merton's No Man Is an Island.