John Donne: Selected Poetry and Prose

Hi there! I'm currently working on something big, just for you! But I don't want you to get bored and think I'm not posting anything ever again. So in the meantime, here's a rant about one of my very favorite poets.

Really, this is going to be more of a rant than an actual review, because I'm pretty biased. In case you haven't heard, John Donne was a sixteenth/seventeenth-century English poet. He had a rather wild and troubled youth, then converted to Anglicism and became a priest. He married the love of his life (under opposition from her family) and they had 10 children. His family wanted him to be a politician but, fortunately for us, he persisted in writing and became one of the greatest poets of his age (ever).
About the book itself: it includes all his "Songs and Sonnets," most of his elegies, his two marriage poems, a couple satires, most of his religious poems, including the holy sonnets, as well as his "Devotions" and extracts from a few of his sermons. It's edited by T.W. and R.J Craik, in case you want to find this particular book, which I think is a nice, not too long selection of Donne's work.
John Donne has something for everybody. He has funny poems ("The Flea" and "Go and Catch a Falling Star" come to mind) sexy poems (really. He wrote lots of those. They're good for seducing people.), romantic poems ("Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" might be the absolute most beautiful, romantic poem in the English language. "The Sun Rising" is a close second.), and plenty of religious poems.Wild youth, priestly adulthood, remember? I truly love his religious poems. They are (sometimes excruciatingly) beautiful and always ring true. My personal favorite is "A Hymn to my God, in my Sickness," but all of them are good. Much of his later poetry was influenced by the death of his beloved wife, and his own chronic sickness. Certainly his Devotions and sermons are. Devotion #17 is actually the origin of both the common phrases "ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" and "no man is an island." Probably didn't know those were about the same thing, did you?
Since Donne wrote a long time ago, and is most famous for using complicated metaphysical analogies, his poetry can be hard to read. To a student of literature, or even someone who reads the Bible a lot, the language shouldn't be a problem. For those others of you, most volumes of his poetry include some sort of note system with modernizations and explanations. The edition I read did, and for the most part they were helpful, but occasionally I would get one that was debatable, or just wrong. So if you do happen to read the very same book, use the notes, but do keep a few grains of salt handy.

In conclusion, John Donne is awesome, and you should definitely read his writings. You don't necessarily have to get a book to read them, though; just google "John Donne poems" and you will find plenty of beautiful, romantic, old-timey goodness.