Selected poems - John Donne

"Bloomsbury Poetry Classics" are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton.;John Donne was born in 1572, of a Roman Catholic family. After an adventurous youth - he voyaged with Essex and Raleigh and was a "great visitor of ladies" - he was imprisoned in 1601 for contracting an illicit marriage. Donne spent the next fourteen years trying to live down this disgrace. He renounced Catholicism, entered the established church and after much ingenious manoeuvring he eventually became Dean of St. Pauls. Donne's poetry, he liked to say, was the mistress of his youth: divinity was the wife of his maturity. In consequence his impassioned and `conceited' verses were not published in his lifetime. He died, a vaunted holy man, in 1631.