John Donne

From his early love poetry to his late religious writing, John Donne speaks of the human body as a book to be read and interpreted. Unlike modern thinkers who understand the body as a purely material phenomenon or post-modern critics who see in it a "text" produced by culture, Donne understands the body as a (scriptural) text written by God. In this study, McDuffie offers a comprehensive interpretation of Donne's reading of the body. In Donne's imaginative universe, the human person lies at the center of the great interconnected web of God's signs and acts. As such, he makes it the touchstone of his own theology. While his anthropology is basically orthodox, the emphasis Donne places on the body and the role it plays in his religious poetics are distinctive. Refusing to restrict God's revelation to the written words of Scripture, Donne turns habitually to the book of the human body as a collection of signs that indicate God's nature, his intent, and the human condition. He also, at times, represents the human body not as a "mere" sign but as sacrament: a seal of the promises of God that conveys his presence and grace. In his reading of the book of the body, Donne discerns the narrative of salvation history: the trajectory proceeding from creation, through fall to redemption and resurrection. He sets the body and salvation history into a dialogical relationship, always reading one in terms of the other. Donne reads in the body God's great love for the material, the ravages of the Fall, God's redemptive action in Christ and in the lives of the saints, and the literal and figurative deaths that serve as gateways to resurrection and eschatological fulfillment.

John Donne (1572-1631) brought to the famous and famously sensual love poems we know as Songs and Sonnets an intellectual force so powerful that he exploded the traditional love lyrics from within. He brought to his magnificent devotional poems and sermons as equally passionate physicality, and his many-sided genius has been supremely significant for the poetry of our own time.

John Donne's sense of form and arrangement, his psychological insight, his differences of mood and emphasis and his religious fervour should make this selection of ten sermons particularly interesting to the attentive reader familiar with Donne's poetry.

This volume of John Donne's writings begins with a biography of John Donne's life, as told by Donne's writer friend, Izaak Walton. Walton gives readers a close look at Donne's past, which was plagued with the loss of many close family members. This biographical information helps readers to make better sense of the somber devotions contained in this volume. In his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Donne concentrates on the miserable condition of man and the inevitability of death. The devotions are all structured the same, each beginning with a meditation followed by an expostulation and a prayer. These devotions serve as a preview for Donne's Death's Duel Sermon, written near his death in 1631 as his funeral sermon. While Death's Duel paints a grave picture of earthly life tormented by pain and death, it hopes for a bright future in God's love through Christ's resurrection and ascension. -Emmalon Davis, CCEL Staff Writer

The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Donne contains Songs and Sonnets, Letters to the Countess of Bedford, The First Anniversary, Holy Sonnets, Divine Poems, excerpts from Paradoxes and Problems, Ignatius His Conclave, The Sermons, Essays and Devotions, and an index of first lines.

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."