The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (Modern Library)

About this book

This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donnes 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 Donnes 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 Donnes prose including many of his private letters; BIgnatius 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 "Deaths 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."