John Donne is best known as a poet of live, brilliantly able to recreate a man's experience of emotions and realities. But he is also a poet of the spiritual journey. His religious poems speak of shame, fear and self-concious complexity and doubt, but his sermons can soar into a word-music seldom equalled, or can condense theology into epigrams as witty as those which date from his youthful lusts. He fascinates because he is a man battered by sex - and by God. David Edwards has written an extremely readable book which ranges over all Donne's poetry and prose, and relates the literature to what is known or probable about his life. He takes twentieth-century research and criticism into careful account but aims to provide more than a detailed examination of a limited part of the subject. He is not sentimental about Donne's faults and limitations, and he does not try to sound superior to either the poet or the preacher. His aim is to achieve a portrait of a living man, a man who both suffered and gloried in his experience of flesh and spirit. David L. Edwards retired as Provost of Southwark Cathedral in 1994. He was formerly a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Editor of the SCM Press, Dean of King's College, Cambridge, and a Canon of Westminster Abbey and the Speaker's Chaplain in the House of Commons.

John Donne is best known as a poet of love, brilliantly able to recreate a man s experience of emotions and realities. But he is also a poet of the spiritual journey. His religious poems speak of shame, fear and self-conscious complexity and doubt, but his sermons can soar into a word-music seldom equalled, or can condense theology into epigrams as witty as those which date from his youthful lusts. He fascinates because he is a man battered by sex - and by God. David Edwards has written an extremely readable book which ranges over all Donne s poetry and prose, and which relates the literature to what is known or probable about the life. He takes twentieth-century research and criticism into careful account but aims to provide more than a detailed examination of a limited part of the subject. He is not sentimental about Donne s faults and limitations, and he does not try to sound superior to either the poet or the preacher. His aim is to achieve a portrait of a living man, a man who both suffered and gloried in his experience of flesh and spirit.

John Donne is best known as England's poet of love -- but he was much else besides. He was also a peerless writer of the spiritual journey, a stalwart churchman, and a great preacher. Yet behind this famed public face there also lived a lesser known tortured and contradictory figure. This extraordinary biography paints a compelling new portrait of Donne as a man of both spirit and flesh. David Edwards ranges across all of Donne's writings, including critically neglected sermons, using them to illuminate Donne's life and vice versa. Itself a masterpiece of writing, this book challenges common views with wit and a critical compassion that does not fail to let Donne speak to readers in his own words.

Praise for previous volumes: "This variorum edition will be the basis of all future Donne scholarship." -- Chronique This is the 4th volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne to appear. This volume presents a newly edited critical text of the Holy Sonnets and a comprehensive digest of the critical-scholarly commentary on them from Donne's time through 1995. The editors identify and print both an earlier and a revised authorial sequence of sonnets, as well as presenting the scribal collection -- which contains unique authorial versions of several of the sonnets -- inscribed by Donne's friend Rowland Woodward in the Westmoreland manuscript.