Snag Your Copy The Complete Poetry And Selected Prose Developed By John Donne Conveyed In Interactive EBook

blows my mind with his poetry and allows me to consider being and nonbeing/essence and existence in ways that my body knows, but my mind rarely considers.
You cannot simply read Donne's poetry you must feel it as well, Batter my heart, religious Donne

No, I didn't read ALL of it, I read his "Sonnets and Songs," "Elegies and Heroical Epistle," and "Holy Sonnets, " I also took a look at his famous "No man is an island entirely of itself" meditation Meditation XVII, and tried to tackle his "Death's Duel," but gave up due to a sheer lack of interest in the subject.


Reading poetry is difficult, I liked some of his sonnets, but I don't think I understood most of his poetry, I had to keep rereading the lines and sometimes the whole sonnet multiple times to understand what he's trying to say.
I'd like to think that it was worth my time just to find some poems I liked,

What kept me from NOT reading all of his poetry and prose and thereby violating my categorical imperative is that I'm just not interested in what he has to say, because I'm not religious and found most of his concerns irrelevant.


I believe that reading is a process of selfdiscovery, You read and read and read to find what you like, what you can identify with, what resonates with your self, at the same time to expand your horizon.
And if a book is not engaging your mind, maybe you're wasting your time, After all, you can get through only so many books in your life, and there are just SO many of them out there.
Sometimes you need to be courageous and wise enough to put down a book that might be preventing you from reading some book you will really love and would regret if you didn't read it.


I'm not saying John Donne is a waste of time for everyone, No, that would be just dumb, What I'm saying is that FOR ME, at least at this stage in my life, his works are worthless because they don't interest me, inspire me, or enrich me.
Maybe I've picked it up at the wrong time, Maybe I'll find it much more engaging, inspiring, and enriching when I read it when I'm older,

But for now, I'm glad to have found some sonnets I like, and with them fermenting in my mind, I'm putting the rest of it down to continue my adventure.



Mine is theedition, therefore does not include the introduction by Denis Donoghue, The creator, for all intents and purposes, of Metaphysical Poetry, A lot of eccentric and strangely musical poetry, The "complete poetry" here is the complete English language poetry, None of the Latin poems are included, This is my third attempt to plow through this book, and this time I'm throwing in the towel for good.
I just don't get Donne, Maybe I need one of those critical editions where some smart person with an English degree explains everything as I go.
Here's where I started, as a Freshman at Amherst College, an enthusiasm for verse I did not entirely comprehend a classmate of mine, Schuyler Pardee, and I went to our wonderful professor, G Armour Craig, with a proposal: Could we perhaps translate Donne for modern students He was genial, did not laugh at us, though our project never got off the drawing board.
Perhaps he recommended further courses, I cannot recall, What I do recall is that my classmate was one of the dozen fellow "poets" in my class, but he also was the first person I knew to commit suicide, a few years after graduation.

When I got to U MN grad school, I took Leonard Unger'sC English Poets seminar, wherein we read Donne and his heirs.
I wrote on Herbert and Andrew Marvell the latter I later pursued in my Ph, D. , This Critical Age: Deliberate Departures from Literary Conventions inC English Verse, advised by Leonard Unger, When I told him I wanted to write on Marvell, Leonard suggested the broader topic which proved so fruitful to me.
Though one might not know it from his criticism, especially in American lit like TS Eliot, Leonard Unger I considered a professor of comparative literature.
For example, his good friend Saul Bellow and he once composed, during lunch at the U MN Faculty Club on the top floor of the Student Union, a verse translation of the first lines of the Wastelandin Yiddish.


At a postdoctoral seminar at Princeton I first encountered the Donne First Edition,, I was befuddled, like its first readers, by the intermix of body/ bawdy and religious poems, Having just completed my dissertation which noted Donne's having lifted "The Indifferent" wholesale from Ovid, Amores II, iv, among the things Donne borrows is his shocking and dramatic shift of pronouns from third to second person, "I can love her and her, and you and you.
. . " Ovid has "sive aliqua est," and six lines later, "sive es docta," then a couplet later, back to third person, "est quae," then back to "you," "tu, quia tam longa es"line.
He took his surprising shifting of tones, from distant connoiseur to precipitant lecher: his "dramatic" pyrotechnics,
In my community college teaching career, I would recite a couple of Donne's poems from memory,
his Song, "Go and catch a falling star," illustrating adunata, the catalog of impossibilities, and sometimes his holy sonnet, "At the round earth's imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise.
. . "
Now for your delectation, an "adunata," list of impossibilities:

Go, and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root
Tell me where all past years are
Orwho cleft the Devil's foot.

Teach me to hear mermaid's singing
Or to keep off Envy's stinging
Or find
What wind
Serves to advance and honest mind.


Note: an Impossibility for an Honest Mind to advance even more true now four centuries later, with criminals, international moneylaunderers in Federal offices, including, we suspect, the LaundererinChief if Putin, then: the Chief Launderer's buddy.
It may also be true in academics, to my relief, an explanation of how my "advancement" has come pretty late.
In grad school, another of Leonard Unger's students was advanced, because he flattered a different, declining professor, quoted him verbatim to his face on his Ph.
D. orals. The earlyonset professor admired his own insights, from a student's mouth, and advanced him to a job at his own graduate institution, Princeton.
I was very happy to get a community college job, where I spentyears engaging the heart of America: hygienists, nurses, firemen, police, teachers, actors, movie house directors, managers of restaurants and cultural performance centers.
I am reading this book as an anthology, and pick it up when I feel like reading some of Donne's work.
I've read a lot of his writing, but not nearly all of it, He's the only author I think who approaches Shakespeare amp I find myself rereading many of my favorite poems he's written.
I'd read some poems by Donne before, but it's amazing reading all his collected poems and being able to appreciate how consistently good they areat least the sonnets and elegies which stand up being compared to those of Shakespeare.
They're erudite, but accessible, although the edition I read didn't regularize the spellingand frankly I think you only gain in readability if that's modernized and can't see what you'd lose unless you have a scholarly interest.
Almost all the "Songs and Sonets" and "Elegies and Historical Epistle" that begin the Poetry section are love poetry, but they really run the gamut in tone.
They're all witty and clever, and some are passionate and gorgeously romantic, Among those I particularly loved "The GoodMorrow," "The Sun Rising" and "Canonization, " Others though are outrageous but funny "The Flea" or bawdy "Love's Progress" or surprisingly sensual, even erotic "To His Mistress Coming to Bed".
Some are irreverent, cynical, even misogynist, and I'm not sure at times whether to take as tongue in cheek such humorous verse as "Go and Catch a Falling Star," "Woman's Constancy" or the last lines of "Love's Alchemy.
" "Hope not for mind in women: at their best sweetness and wit, they are but Mummy possessed, " However, so many of the love poems seem to so strongly imply mutual love based on a respect for the beloved, it's hard to take seriously Donne's sometimes twitting of the female sex.
And reading his prose, which often speaks on topics concerning women, somehow doesn't clarify but only complicates the issue, I have to admit grinning though at his epigram, "A Self Accuser:" Your mistress, that you follow whores, still taxeth you/'Tis strange that she should thus confess it, though 't be true.




The best of the poetry are definitely amazing "five star" reads, but I wasn't enchanted by all of his poetry.
I can't say I found any of the "Satyres" or "Verse Letters" all that winning, The next section in which I could say I could list favorites were among his "Holy Sonnets" which included XVII "At the round earth's imagin'd corners," the famous X "Death Be Not Proud" and XIV "Batter my heart, three perso'd God.
" The believing Christian may find the section of Divine Poems even more appealing, but even an unbeliever like me could appreciate their brilliance and passion as every bit as extraordinary as the love poetry.
All in all, I'd rate the poetry section about four or even four and half in terms of how much I loved them, despite some I wasn't taken with.


But then there's Donne's prose, It was moving, or at least interesting, reading some of his letters that dealt with his marriage, and there's the famous MeditationFrom Devotions upon Emergent Occasions with its famous "no man is an island" passage.
But I have to admit, I found most of the prose works a true slog I soon was skimming, It's not that I couldn't see there was a first rate mind still at work, But in the end I'm not a believing Christian, and the bulk of his prose workshalf of them in the book are sermonsdeal with very esoteric and dated religious issues I just couldn't care less aboutand I'm the kind of person who actually read Lewis' Mere Christianity from beginning to end and counts Dante a favorite.
So unless a reader has a scholarly interest inth century Christian theology, I'd find it hard to believe they would find reading these prose works interesting in the same way as, for instance, Montaigne's Essays written in the century before Donne which range wider in their topics and are still relevant and accessible to the modern reader.
So unless you're a Donne scholar or have a particular interest in his times, you might actually be best off seeking a book with a selection of his poetry rather than this more comprehensive collection of his works of both his poetry and prose.
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