The Love Poems of John Donne - Hardcover

Donne, John; Fowkes, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312499442 ISBN 13: 9780312499440

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1982

Synopsis

John Donne's standing as one of the greatest poets in the English language is now thoroughly established, and critics such as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis have found in Donne's poetry qualities profoundly responsive to the modern age. While Donne is famous for his religious poetry, his love poems are among the most beautiful ever written, and this collection brings them together for the first time.

Donne was a man who knew all the many faces of love-- physical passion, jealousy, rapture, grief and parting-- and possessed the genius to distill his experiences into poetry. The potency of his writing has lost none of its effect; Donne's love poetry taps the reservoir of feelings and emotions common to all human beings.

Before Donne was ordained as a priest in 1615, he wrote sonnets (such as "The Dream" and "The Ecstasy"), elegies (such as "To His Mistress Going to Bed" and "Love's Progress"), and wedding songs ("St. Valentine's Day" and "Epithalamion"), all of which glitter with an eroticism that truly marries body and soul.

Charles Fowkes, author of a critically acclaimed biography of Rembrandt and several anthologies of short stories, has gathered those poems in which Donne is most passionate and most lyrical. The result is this lovely volume- the perfect gift for every beloved, a book of poems to press flowers in and to keep by the heart.

About this title

Review:

“if there is one area of literature that is ideally suited to the talking book format it is poetry. Gifted readers tease out sense and meaning... and reveal rhythm, metre and nuance... The effect is electrifying: Burton’s deep powerful Welsh voice pumps hot blood through the veins of the intellectual poet and renders passionately human the sometimes convoluted imagery... Through ingeniously sustained imagery, his rigorously high ideals of love blaze with a directness and occasional physicality that, as delivered here by Burton, make one catch one’s breath.”
Sunday Times 15/2/98

From the Back Cover:

Turning his back on the ascetic medieval and the ideal Renaissance concepts, Donne described a real and experienced love, a love the pinnacle of which is the joyous union of body and soul.

The poems in this collection display his precocious virtuosity, bending both meaning and sound to the service of the Metaphysical conceit.

SIDE ONE

· The Good Morrow
· Song: Go and catch a falling star
· The Rising Sun
· The Canonisation
· The Triple Fool
· Song: Sweetest love I do not go
· The Legacie
· A Feaver
· The Anniversary
· The Flea
· The Curse

SIDE TWO

· A Nocturnall
· The Apparition
· A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
· The Extasie
· The Funerall
· The Relique
· Elegy1: Jealosie
· Elegy VIII: The Comparision
· Elegy VII: Natures lay Ideot

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0312499442
• ISBN 13: 9780312499440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 100