The Complete Poetry & Selected Prose of John Donne

This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,""The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His MistrisGoing to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling ofDonne's prose, including many of his private letters; "Ignatius His Conclave, " a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from "Biathanatos, " his celebrated defense of suicide; and hismost famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetratingvoice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time."