Death mark of the poet John Donne, engraved by Martin Droeshout, London 1632. (Photo by Bettmann / Getty) During the 16th century, the English were unusually spirited in their destruction of ...

And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne. Donne was made of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in ...

Finally a biography of John Donne that captures his eccentricities, his contradictions, his fabulous twists and turns, his trickiness, and—as one critic has put it—his thinking “awry and squint.” ...

Ms. Rundell is the author, most recently, of “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” from which this essay has been adapted. The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

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. It was a collection ...

As resolutely canonical as they seem to us now, the “Holy Sonnets” of John Donne (1572–1631) flicker with some uncertainty in the imaginary museum hall of English literature. We think we know them.

John Donne’s reply to Marlowe, perhaps written to amuse fellow residents at the Inns of Court, where he was once Master of the Revels, also reads a bit like satire. “Come live with me ...

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It is these realities that are called out of this shadowland, this vague and gray existence, by the conjuration of one of the masters of English poetry, John Donne: Donne has expressed ...

(A review of Hugh l'Anson Fausset's John Donne: A Study in Discord.) The eighteenth century, with its regard for symmetry and definition, preferred to keep biography and criticism separated ...