Minor: Highlighting and notes are limited to only a few lines or pages, or to a small percentage of the entire book.Notes and/or highlighting, but no significant wear.minor cosmetic marks, contact, previous owner’s name). No notes or highlighting, and no significant wear.Yet what truly makes his Poems the book of a lifetime – a book for a lifetime – is the way it explores and contains such extremes and contradictions. This was how he wished to be remembered, as “Dr” Donne the priest, not “Jack” Donne the gallant. A needle-like statue of white marble in St Paul’s commemorates him as a man of God, awaiting judgement in his shroud. As dean of St Paul’s, he became a well-known public figure in London, dark-featured, handsome, with a famous charm and sensitivity of manner. After a scandalous marriage and a labour of decades to regain respectability, he ended his days as a churchman – and perhaps the most striking preacher of the time. Donne himself was ambivalent about both popularity and posterity.Įarly life made him cautious, as a Catholic born into Protestant suppression. Even now he is prone to condemnation from theorists who miss his self-critical ironies. In the longer run, this gave him a rough ride with the critics until the last hundred years. In the 1630s no less than the 1930s, he was admired for his “difficulty” – his mastery of paradox, the range of his learning, the sheer oddness of his diction – as much as his provocative directness. It comes, rather, in astounding spontaneous sprawls, which then assume patterns of fabulous consistency. Donne’s poetry does not fall neatly into its lines, couplets, stanzas.

Whether presenting a flea to a resistant mistress or berating Death, they “spring from the thought of the moment”, as one particularly fine editor put it yet they are also deeply thought-out, schematic, set like traps.Īs verse, these poems broke all the rules.

They take on many voices and pose insoluble problems to the heart and mind alike. The poems are no less astonishing now than they were then.

He had died in 1631, aged 59, a poet of vehement love and troubled faith. Many poems he deemed too scandalous others seemingly too personal. It was a collection, however, which Donne had refused to grant an eager public during his lifetime. At that time, St Dunstan’s was a hub of literary and legal chat, and given his fascination with the grave, an especially apt location for John Donne’s poems to appear. In 1633, a bookseller based in a churchyard on Fleet Street issued a long-awaited collection of poetry.

Selected Poems by John Donne