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The Complete English Poems

by John Donne, A.J. Smith

4.23 · rating details · 1,067 ratings · 34 reviews

The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Donne contains Songs and Sonnets, Letters to the Countess of Bedford, The First Anniversary, Holy Sonnets, Divine Poems, excerpts from Paradoxes and Problems, Ignatius His Conclave, The Sermons, Essays and Devotions, and an ind...more

Mass Market Paperbound, 688 pages

Published August 25th 1977 by Penguin Books (first published February 28th 1922)

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Aug 20, 2007

Clay rated it

· review of another edition

John Donne was preeminent among the group of 17th century poets Samuel Johnson would later dub “metaphysical.” The term was meant to deride a poetics Johnson thought too obscure, allusive, and just straight up difficult. Donne’s love poetry would make girls’ heads, not their hearts ache. His religious poetry didn’t reform so much as confuse. It was all just so many “heterogenous ideas…yoked by violence together.” Now, this is a matter of taste. I happen to like my poesy violent.

Don...more

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Jan 28, 2012

Andrea Rubin is currently reading it · review of another edition

I took this book out of the library because I read that Theodore Roethke brought lists of verbs from 17th century poetry to his students and told his students for their own poetic deepening to read poetry from the 17th century and earlier. I remember reading John Donne in high school when I did not get it at all. But now I get it. I get it even though I don't get it. I find myself compelled to sit there and figure it out. The archaic word order I find compelling and I sit there puzzling over it ...more

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Jan 28, 2012

Jan-Maat added it

Shelves: 17th-century, british-isles, poetry

Donne's poems were never published in his own lifetime but circulated in manuscript form.

THE SUN RISING.

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;...more

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Aug 09, 2009

Patrick Gibson rated it

Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Patrick by: Mrs. S.

Shelves: poetry

I worked for the Chautauqua Opera when I was 22. It’s a summer music festival. I had an affair with a married woman in her 40’s lasting eight weeks. It was luscious and thrilling. Chautauqua is the perfect place for romance and opera. Come fall when the leaves started plummeting and the artist Diaspora sent actors and crew on their way, we parted, my paramour and I. She gave me a book of Donne—with dried flowers pressed in the pages. I now place the book on my Goodreads shelf. The flowers are st...more

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Apr 02, 2011

Robert Browning rated it

John Donne is, with apologies to my unintentional namesake, my absolute favorite poet. He covers all the big three topics that great poetry should - Love, Death, and God - and, more often than not, he's covering all three at the same time in the span of 14 short, beautiful little lines of epic proportion.

Every time I come back to his work I find something new to enjoy. I can marvel at poems that put down Death as a trivial and temporary inconvenience, take a mere object like a mathemat...more

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Dec 03, 2011

Adria Guinart rated it

This review only focus in the poem Butter my heart and it is a paper I wrote for my course in English Literature:

A triple but unique way of addressing God in John Donne’s Butter my heart

In the following essay the relationship established between the speaker and God in Batter my heart by John Donne (1572-1631) will be commented, but before developing the analysis it could be convenient to set the stage. John Donne is a well known author usually attached to the group ...more

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Apr 05, 2010

Kevin Albrecht rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: Lovers of poetry

Shelves: poetry

John Donne's work is witty and full of many different forms of poetry. I was greatly inspired by his poetry, but frequently found his poems difficult to get deeply interested in at first. I am certain that I will only like him more as time goes on and I reread his poems. My favorite poems were "The good-morrow", "A feaver", "Communitie", and "Sir John Wingefield". "Communitie" especially is very intriguing, for while most of Donne's work seems to...more

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Feb 16, 2009

Kristopher Swinson rated it

· review of another edition

2.65. This contained an assortment of subjects. To put it bluntly, some material was much better than other material. His verse letters were pretty bad and, for reasons I’ll go into below, he probably should have stayed clear of most love panegyrics. However, this began to improve in his themes on marriage (with the recurrent development of a union of souls, 38-40, 71, 89), satires, and holy sonnets. But how complete was this selection, anyway? It didn’t even contain his famous Meditation XVII, ...more2.65. This contained an assortment of subjects. To put it bluntly, some material was much better than other material. His verse letters were pretty bad and, for reasons I’ll go into below, he probably should have stayed clear of most love panegyrics. However, this began to improve in his themes on marriage (with the recurrent development of a union of souls, 38-40, 71, 89), satires, and holy sonnets. But how complete was this selection, anyway? It didn’t even contain his famous Meditation XVII, though we find another reference to the “passing bell” (144). Death was another thing about which he wrote a great deal (see 215). John Donne is a religious writer par excellence, and that is what I enjoyed most!

Donne writes of love as a “feaver” (18) that will burn the world, which was reminiscent of Will Durant’s observation, ever so applicable to our day, that “sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.” (He touches on a moralistic application on 144.) “Breake of Day” reminded me of an Air Supply song. ;-) He has a rather romantic ring early on—since it’s hard to improve on “If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee” (8)—but this rapidly descends into bitterness (9, 27). I prefer to view much of his love poetry as conflicted emotions rather than what certainly appears to be a sort of malicious, pre-Victorian objectization of women (26, 31, 84, then contradicted or affirmed by 160's “You, for whose body God made better clay”). We ask ourselves whether he actually hates women (56), only to have that apparently answered in the affirmative (113, 125, 189) upon reading his ready acceptance of a jaded interpretation (and continuation) of original sin. He expostulates rather directly “that no woman’s true” (75; 150: “for you are here The first good Angell, since the worlds frame stood, That ever did in womans shape appear”; see 164).

Some of his stanzas place love on par with warfare (28, 37, 84-85), suffering (70), and even death (17, 52), feelings which I can share if understood carefully. In terms of the warfare, how true it is that “though ‘tis got by chance, ‘tis kept by art” (77). In his ire, he deviates from the acceptable norm. He has some strange thoughts on monogamy (29, 78-79) or adultery (75) and there are hints here and there that he goes so far as to become homosexual or bisexual because he is so tired of “mind” appreciation only (46). He references as “negative love” that which “soare[s:] no higher Than vertue or the minde to’admire” (50), which reminded me of a Frasier episode in which he retorted to his brother something like, “Are you accusing me of only being interested in her mind?”

Sad to relate, I read only too well into what became a Valentine’s Day theme—and he wrote one of his poems in commemoration of the day—that of being doomed to “love her, that loves not me” (41-42, 142), or “Thou Love taught’st me, by appointing mee To love there, where no love receiv’d can be, Only to give to such as have an incapacitie” (43).

Among his insightful epigrams, I find one on “An Obscure Writer”: “Philo, with twelve yeares study, hath beene griev’d To be understood; when will hee be beleev’d” (89). I once copied something from a letter Robert Burns wrote to his father: “As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it. I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes. Indeed, I am altogether unconcerned at the thoughts of this life. I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me.” Clearly, fame finds the man, and not the other way around. I also rather enjoyed his quipped, “To will, implyes delay, therefore now doe . . .” (98).

We find shared thoughts, as with Milton’s “The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (Paradise Lost, 1.254-255) possibly echoing Donne’s “Be thou thine owne home, and in thy selfe dwell; Inne any where, continuance maketh hell” (130). I also read (http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes...) that “the idea that ‘all the world’s a stage’ was already cliched when Shakespeare wrote As You Like It,” so we are not surprised at Donne’s usage of “all this world was but a stage” (201). Elizabeth Drury (eulogized well in 201, 206) inspired him in a weird way like Dante’s Beatrice.

He had a very serious and fairly critical bent of mind, yet the intonation of his poetry often picked up an almost rollicking pace (particularly on 76). He was similarly, and confusingly, capable of very shallow (79) and sensual (81-84, 86, 170, 173) language. His commentary on false religious notions (95, 97, 109, 211) was so thoroughly on the mark! I’m inclined to think that he shone the most when actually being worshipful to God or commenting on the absence of virtue at court. He really was quite the religious thinker. I liked such observations as “He which said, Plough And looke not back, to looke up doth allow” (155), “Vertue hath some perversenesse; For she will Neither beleeve her good, nor others ill” (156), “Nor smels it well to hearers, if one tell Them their disease, who faine would think they’re well” (196), or “What fragmentary rubbidge this world is Thou knowest, and that it is not worth a thought; He honors it too much that thinkes it nought” (201). And yet most of his writing on the progress of the soul was inane nonsense.

It’s my fault for using what was once my father’s old edition, but this book could certainly have used some notes and commentary, if not taken to excess.(less)

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Feb 08, 2012

Richard Corey (HMSH) rated it

I have not actually read the whole thing, but what I have read is fascinating; throughout his life, he ran the gamut from holy man to sexual conquistador, and sometimes both. His poems reflect all of this with a skill and wonder that hasn't often been replicated.

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Aug 28, 2011

Fran Linhart added it

Hard to read ... John Adams use text from the book for his opera; thought the opera was wonderful; the poems - HARD to read

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May 16, 2009

Lynda rated it

Shelves: classics

"No man is an island" is so profound that it even shows up in dialog on tv shows.

Donne's English poems often make me cry.

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Jul 18, 2010

Lori rated it

Currently reading the poetry of John Donne. A true inspiration for my own poetry.

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Jun 11, 2009

Ehbluemle Bluemle added it

Complete English Poems: John Donne (Penguin Classics) by John Donne (1977)

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Sep 06, 2010

Rachel added it

One of my favorite classes in college was on Donne.

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Jan 03, 2011

Ellie rated it

Shelves: poetry, british

I so love John Donne. Doesn't everybody?

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Oct 22, 2009

Pam P rated it

Shelves: poetry

I am still sorry I let this one go.

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Apr 23, 2007

Ryan Chapman rated it

Recommends it for: Brit Lit Readers

Shelves: poetry

I only really did a close reading of a few poems for work, but, along with my own research on the metaphysical poets, gave me an appreciation for this school of poetry. Donne's work is tough, certainly. I was baffled by A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning the first couple times. Now I can see what a rich poem it is, with dizzyingly recursive metaphors and a beautifully loaded conceit. I've never been a good poetry reader, and this has helped me sharpen my critical lens. Go Donne go!

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Jan 23, 2008

Steven rated it

Shelves: history, poetry, biography, fiction, favorites, love, religion, romance, writing

I've liked John Donne since discovering him in high school, re-reading his poems from time to time. He brought an intensity to his love poems that was equal to, if not greater than, his more religious and non-religious poems. (It's a perfect complement to the turbulent emotions of high school, actually.) He is one of the few poets I've read who dealt with the complexities of love in all its myriad forms.

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Dec 18, 2011

Destiney marked it as to-read

I like this book because it has a very special proper language and it makes all the poems flow in such a nice way. Many of the lines in this book are famous lines and have been used in Other book before. I do recommend this book because it is really good and many of the poems in this book touch you where it is really important.

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Oct 02, 2007

Chris M. rated it

Saying I like all of Donne's poetry is a bit strong. In fact, I find uneven--some of it is just okay, some of it truly amazing. "For whom the bell tolls..." has some of the most misquoted lines in English literature and on deserves more credit than it's usually crappy application suggests.

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Jul 23, 2011

Kari rated it

I love Donne's work and still remember bits that I memorised for my exams. Despite the difference in language and age of the poems, I believe they are still quite accessible to modern readers and can still be enjoyed for their wittiness and clever use of the conceit.

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Mar 11, 2008

Jesuswept1333 rated it

Shelves: english-literature-poetry

My favoite poet and another artist to whom I owe my mother profound gratitude. She brought his poem Love's Infiniteness to life for me and it had a major impact on my impressions concerning human love and courtship. If you read no other poem read that one.

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Jan 11, 2011

Rachel Ropper rated it

Shelves: en2003, own, 2010, poetry

Read for EN2003: Mediaeval and Renaissance Texts, 2010 - 2011

I didn't read all of the poems in this volume, especially as our course mainly focused on the Songs & Sonnets, but I did really enjoy reading them. Especially as I got a 15 on my essay!

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Mar 08, 2008

Katherine rated it

John Donne. You have to love those consecrated, cerebral love poems set right next to those passionate, hot-blooded religious poems. These are some of the highest-density concentrations of meaning and metaphor that our language has ever seen.

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Aug 10, 2010

Mrtmr rated it

Shelves: british, poetry

Donne's rhythms and pacing, coupled with his unique poetic presentations, make for fantastic verse. Eliot was right to reintroduce the Metaphysical poets to the modern reader.

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Oct 30, 2007

Elizabeth rated it

The thinking man's poet. Even Donne's romantic poetry is so cerebral it resists any hint of cheesiness. Graceful, dextrous writing balanced with wit and intelligence.

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Jul 20, 2007

Gretchyn rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: all poets.

To see Donne's transformation through his work is unbelievable. I used to read this aloud before bed for about a year or so. Raw emotion and charming verse.

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May 21, 2011

Logan rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: important-works, poems, favourites, best-works-of-art

One star off simply because it's a collection, and collections are bound to contain some duds. Donne may be one of the best, but he wasn't perfect.

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Jan 19, 2012

Lynda Peev rated it

Recommends it for: all those who admire real poems

a Lovely journey through the magnifecent world of English poems!

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Oct 24, 2008

April rated it

What can I say? The guy is one of the most entertaining poets of the 16-17th centuries.

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About John Donne

John Donne was an English poet, preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to that of...more

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