Selected Poems

This volume collects Donne's English verse, written mainly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and gathered after his death in 1631. The Songs and Sonnets argue about love, absence, and the body; the Elegies and satires are more worldly and urban; the Divine Poems and Holy Sonnets turn the same ingenious argument on sin, death, and last judgement. Recurring figures are lovers in a room, a speaker addressing God as judge or spouse, and a mind that thinks by conceit and paradox. The book is a complete English poetic corpus, not a narrative life or a selection of only the sacred or only the erotic poems.

Quarter-bound in red leather binding with illustrated cloth sides and gilt spine title. Page top edge red. Red slipcase.