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, ...

He closes the sonnet with words of wonder at Christ’s graciousness: “And if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise, / Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.” When I consider Donne’s picture of ...

(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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...