The Complete English Poems
Donne shattered the smooth surfaces of Elizabethan love poetry and replaced them with arguments, paradoxes, and intellectual fireworks.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
Why It Matters
Donne shattered the smooth surfaces of Elizabethan love poetry and replaced them with arguments, paradoxes, and intellectual fireworks. He made thinking sexy and turned private experience — love, death, faith — into material for the most intense English verse of the 17th century. Every poet who mixes ideas with emotion is working in territory Donne opened up.
The 
Take
Personal reviewSolid, super lofty and metaphysical, maybe a little too metaphysical to be perfect for me
Notable Quotes
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.”
“Come live with me, and be my love, and we will some new pleasures prove.”