John Donne (21 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to that of his contemporaries.
The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses on a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.
An invaluable guide for both student and teacher, this collection of specially written essays offers the most up-to-date scholarship and introduces students to the current thinking and debates about John Donne - the pre-eminent 'metaphysical' poet, and one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Sixteen new essays, written by an international array of leading scholars and critics, cover Donne's poetry and his prose. The editor and her colleagues have produced an exceptionally useful book, making this just the latest in one of the best series of scholarly volumes ever conceived and published by any academic press.
English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This introductory Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, provides individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell, together with general essays on the political, social context, and the relationship of poetry to the mutations and developments of genre and tradition.
John Donne II: The Critical Heritage (Critical Heritage Series)
The writings in this second volume on Donne cover the years between 1873 and 1923. The collection includes commentary and criticism from Henry Morley, Edmund Gosse, W.F. Collier, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Augistin Beers, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and many others. Together these works record the evolution of critical views on Donne from nineteenth century onwards, and his growing importance in the twentieth-century literary canon.
