He closes the sonnet with words of wonder at Christ’s graciousness: “And if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise, / Deign at my ...

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, and be my love, ...

The title of Katherine Rundell’s biography of the Renaissance poet and divine, John Donne, comes from his sermons, which few people read today. In a funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert (the mother of ...

If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page ...

John Donne: The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs 536pp, Viking, £20 The picture of John Donne "in the pose of a melancholy lover", which was recently bought by the National Portrait Gallery, has once ...

Katherine Rundell has just become the youngest ever winner of the prestigious literary prize – for a biography of ‘poet of desire’ John Donne. Why is she giving the £50,000 away? Because, she says, no ...

Why do we humans make and listen to poetry? “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” — everything in it is worthy of our attention. A poet fixes our gaze on some God-created being or experience ...

(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; or, if ...

THE author explains in his preface that, while this book was undertaken as an “academic exercise”, it fulfils a long-standing desire dating from a time many years earlier when he fell under the spell ...

In 1633, a bookseller based in a churchyard on Fleet Street issued a long-awaited collection of poetry. At that time, St Dunstan’s was a hub of literary and legal chat, and given his fascination with ...