The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics)
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Product Description
No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy, from sacred devotion to lust, he conveys an astonishing range of emotions and poetic moods. Constant in his work, however, is an intensity of feeling and expression and complexity of argument that is as evident in religious meditations such as 'Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward' as it is in secular love poems such as 'The Sun Rising' or 'The Flea'. 'The intricacy and subtlety of his imagination are the length and depth of the furrow made by his passion,' wrote Yeats, pinpointing the unique genius of a poet who combined ardour and intellect in equal measure.
About the Author
John Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572. After a conventional education at Hart Hall, Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, he took part in the Earl of Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. He secretly married Anne More in December 1601 and was imprisoned by her father, Sir George, in the Fleet two months later. He was ordained priest in January 1615 and took a Doctorate of Divinity at Cambridge the same year. He was made Dean of St Paul's in London in 1621, a position he held until his death in 1631. He is famous for the sermons he preached in his later years, as well as for his poems.
A.J. Smith was Professor Emeritus of the University of Southampton. His book include Literary Love (1983) and Metaphysical Wit (1992). He died in Salisbury in 1991.
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First Sentence
Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see, But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is Love must not be, but take a body too, And therefore what thou wert, and who I bid love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow, And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see, But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is Love must not be, but take a body too, And therefore what thou wert, and who I bid love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow, And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Here we see the English language at its most beautiful exposing the many facets of love with courageous honesty and stunning insight. The human condition has never been better expressed and love has never had such a worthy exponent. For poetry lovers from Wordsworth to TS Eliot, Donne demonstrates how wonderful the English language is at expressing every nuance of our existence and what an amazing servant it can be in the right hands.
You will treasure this book and dip into it often throughout a variety of moods. It will never let you down nor cease to surprise.
You will treasure this book and dip into it often throughout a variety of moods. It will never let you down nor cease to surprise.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
John Donne is widely appreciated for his combination of wit (meaning agility of mind) and emotion, uniting the two in crisp yet melodic poetry - although for centuries his verse was thought to be unmusical. A unified sensibility is what T.S Eliot found in him, meaning that a thought was an experience to him just like the scent of a rose. He is my favourite poet with certain lines lingering forever in the mind: "Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,/ Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time" where the last line drags out its rhythm to echo the sense. A poem such as "The Will" requires a decoding of each stanza: read the final line in each verse first so that you see why he is bequeathing a certain aspect of himself to a particular recipient - and yet it is also a moving poem from a disappointed and cynical lover. Donne is valued for his conceits (extravagant analogies); the drama in his treatment of topics; the density of his language; the immediacy even colloquialism of his language; the range of his references, many scientific; his intellectual capacites along with strength of emotion; his variety of sentence structures; the deft skill of the way he changes direction in argument and his direct appeal to a reader. His contemporaries thought him original though Dr Johnson found "the most heterogenous ideas...yoked by violence together". This volume contains his complete poetic works and is an authoritative text yet a reader might be happier with a selection of the best poems (love and religious) with explanatory footnotes. If you do not need the Verse Letters and/or Anniversaries in their fulness you might want the Songs and Sonnets only and concentrate on them before moving on to this exhaustive compilation. Another possibility is "The Metaphysical Poets" where selected poems can be read in context. (I have reviewed the Helen Gardner edition on this site also.)
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
A great book
5 Jan 2007
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I am greatly enjoying this book. The notes at the end explain some of Donne's more obscure imagery. A potentially controversial choice by the editor was to change the spelling of many words to more modern forms, which makes the poems easier to read at the expense of authenticity. Some people will like that and some people won't. Another odd choice was to list the poems in alphabetical order, instead of grouping them by subject matter or attemp to list them in approxiamte chronolgical order.
Buy this book and enjoy the breathtaking poems. You could do a lot worse with your time.
Buy this book and enjoy the breathtaking poems. You could do a lot worse with your time.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Enjoying poetry that sounds good when read out loud
30 Nov 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Finally, I've found a poet I really like reading. Donne's poems suit me more than Shakespeare's sonnets or Poe's verse, and apart from someone like Yvor Winters, I just don't get modern poetry (apologies to Sylvia Plath fans).
What rings well with me is, well, ringing well! Reading a poem out loud with a bit of drama should just sound good. That's why rap and hip hop can really be considered poetry (well, some rap and hiphop anyway).
A great example of this is Shakespeare's sonnet 129 (The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action; and till action, lust...). Most (not all) of Shakespeare's sonnets are harder to understand than this one, which is why they don't resonate with me as well as I'd like. Donne on the other hand is different; most of what he writes in English sounds good and is immediately understandable.
Not that I understand everything in these poems, there are many contemporary allusions that are lost on me, but there's enough in there that sounds very good to allow me to right away enjoy myself. Here are two great lines, which open the sonnet "Community", to illustrate what I mean by good sound.
Good we must love, and must hate ill,
For ill is ill, and good good still...
There are problems, themselves interesting, that bring discord to a poem. For instance in Donne's England "love" rhymed with "prove" but because today these words don't, a couplet with this rhyme is marred to our 21st century ears.
A personal note: I was in bed reading "Soul Made Flesh" about the discovery that the brain is the seat of consciousness, made by Oxford scholars in 17th century England. I had reached an account of how large audiences of curious onlookers gathered to see doctors perform autopsies. I put the book down and decided to dip into Donne before going to sleep. I flipped out when I read The Damp's opening lines:
When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends' curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part...
Talk about serendipity! Now if I had just read an explanation of these lines in the notes, they would not have meant much to me. But because reading "Soul Made Flesh" had transported me into Donne's England for a few moments, the dramatic effect of the opening was multiplied immensely.
In a nutshell, I find that I love Donne and I recommend this comprehensive easy-to-carry well-annotated edition. My only negative comment is that the editing is a bit unimaginative: the editor places the sonnets in alphabetical order of title simply because there is no accepted canonical ordering... Oh well.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
What rings well with me is, well, ringing well! Reading a poem out loud with a bit of drama should just sound good. That's why rap and hip hop can really be considered poetry (well, some rap and hiphop anyway).
A great example of this is Shakespeare's sonnet 129 (The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action; and till action, lust...). Most (not all) of Shakespeare's sonnets are harder to understand than this one, which is why they don't resonate with me as well as I'd like. Donne on the other hand is different; most of what he writes in English sounds good and is immediately understandable.
Not that I understand everything in these poems, there are many contemporary allusions that are lost on me, but there's enough in there that sounds very good to allow me to right away enjoy myself. Here are two great lines, which open the sonnet "Community", to illustrate what I mean by good sound.
Good we must love, and must hate ill,
For ill is ill, and good good still...
There are problems, themselves interesting, that bring discord to a poem. For instance in Donne's England "love" rhymed with "prove" but because today these words don't, a couplet with this rhyme is marred to our 21st century ears.
A personal note: I was in bed reading "Soul Made Flesh" about the discovery that the brain is the seat of consciousness, made by Oxford scholars in 17th century England. I had reached an account of how large audiences of curious onlookers gathered to see doctors perform autopsies. I put the book down and decided to dip into Donne before going to sleep. I flipped out when I read The Damp's opening lines:
When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends' curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part...
Talk about serendipity! Now if I had just read an explanation of these lines in the notes, they would not have meant much to me. But because reading "Soul Made Flesh" had transported me into Donne's England for a few moments, the dramatic effect of the opening was multiplied immensely.
In a nutshell, I find that I love Donne and I recommend this comprehensive easy-to-carry well-annotated edition. My only negative comment is that the editing is a bit unimaginative: the editor places the sonnets in alphabetical order of title simply because there is no accepted canonical ordering... Oh well.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A Fabulous Collection
21 Jan 2010
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful collection of Donne's poetry. It's excellent for any reader, experienced and first-timers alike. Even with no previous exposure to Donne, this collection offers extensive introductions and footnotes for all of collections contained in this book. And for more experienced Donne readers, this collection really is complete. Excellent for collectors, students, readers, and newcomers.
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