Tragedy is a gift from the gods to men. I am not talking about the tragedy of the tragic poets. I am talking about the tragedy that, from time to time, all men are condemned to undergo. But the gods ...

Why do we humans make and listen to poetry? “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” — everything in it is worthy of our attention. A poet fixes our gaze on some God-created being or experience ...

Reach her, about must, and about must go, And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so. These lines from the third of John Donne’s satires, written sometime in the 1590s, express and enact ...

John Donne had gone on to say, of that same tolling bell, “for even that voice, that I must die now, is not the voice of a judge that speaks by way of condemnation, but of a physician that presents ...

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.” ...

This essay traces the varying implications of the word-concept conversion from the early Reformation to its use in John Donne’s poems and sermons, in a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, and in John ...

Ms. Rundell is the author, most recently, of “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” from which this essay has been adapted. The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man. It was ...

If you’ve studied the writings of John Donne, the 17th-century English poet and priest, you know that many of his verses are filled with sexual innuendo that's masked with religious symbols and ...

In her “thrilling reassessment of Donne’s oddly hinged career”, Katherine Rundell argues that the transformation was less unlikely than it seems. Donne’s poetry often involved the “yoking together of ...