Complete poems

More perhaps than ever before, Donne has been appreciated in the mid-twentieth century. In many ways a man born out of his time, he created a new form of lyric and satire and of elegiac and religious verse. He has qualities which excite the twentieth- century mind: independence of view and a compact manner of expression encompassing conflicting moods, impassioned paradox, outbreaks of cynicism, and above all a wry humour. Only four of Donne's poems were actually published in his lifetime, the first collected edition appearing in 1633 and a fuller one in 1635.In this complete collected edition the poems are arranged in the following groups: Songs and Sonnets, Epigrams. Elegies, Epithalamions, Satires, Letters to Several Personages, Funeral Elegies. An Anatomy of the World, The Progress of the Soul, Divine Poems and Holy Sonnets, etc. The spelling in the text has been modernized.Donne's style in the Satires is forceful, and their couplets attain something of the liberation of later dramatic blank verse. The Elegies probably reveal Donne at his most individual.Always rewarding to read and reason with, Donne is not for the lazy-minded—and this is not to be wondered at from the man who. as Dean of St Paul's from 1621 until his death in 1631, was to leave some of the most memorable sermons in English.