| Summary: | "John Donne produced some of the finest writing in any language about the pleasures and mysteries of love and religion. His restless imagination and voracious intellect invested his poetry and prose with an unprecedented dramatic energy and metaphoric intensity. His work is formally inventive, aggressively pushing against the very generic boundaries it enters. Even commonplace sentiments are rendered breathtakingly vivid and witty when filtered through Donne's singular intelligence. Yet wit and intelligence sometimes come at a cost. Donne can be difficult, deliberately difficult. Even his friends and contemporaries sometimes had trouble understanding his works. Ben Jonson, the Renaissance dramatist and poet, thought "That Donne himself, for not being understood, would perish.""--
"John Donne was a writer of dazzling extremes. He was a notorious rake and eloquent preacher; he wrote poems of tender intimacy, and lyrics of gross misogyny. This book offers a comprehensive account of early modern life and culture as it relates to Donne's richly varied body of work. Short, lively, and accessible chapters written by leading experts in early modern studies shed light on Donne's literary career, language and works as well as exploring the social and intellectual contexts of his writing and its reception from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. These chapters provide the depth of interpretation that Donne demands, and the range of knowledge that his prodigiously learned works elicit. Supported by a chronology of Donne's life and works and a comprehensive bibliography, this volume is a major new contribution to the study and criticism on the age of Donne and his writing." -- Publisher's description
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