ISBN The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne

The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne


This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne’s great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne’s satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne’s prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death’s Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time."


About author(s)
John Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572. After a conventional education at Hart Hall, Oxford, and Lincoln’s Inn, he took part in the Earl of Essex’s expedition to the Azores in 1597. He secretly married Anne More in December 1601 and was imprisoned by her father, Sir George More, in the Fleet two months later. He was ordained as a priest in January 1615 and took a doctorate of divinity at Cambridge the same year. He was made dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1621, a position he held until his death in 1631. He is famous for the sermons he preached in his later years as well as for his poems.