Donne’s poetry isn’t so easy to master. His near contemporary Ben Jonson and his later advocate William Hazlitt both seem to have formed the same view, namely that Donne was a brilliant man, a poetic ...

Death mark of the poet John Donne, engraved by Martin Droeshout, London 1632. (Photo by Bettmann / Getty) During the 16th century, the English were unusually spirited in their destruction of Catholics ...

Finally a biography of John Donne that captures his eccentricities, his contradictions, his fabulous twists and turns, his trickiness, and—as one critic has put it—his thinking “awry and squint.” ...