Critics' Opinion:
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Published in USA
Apr 2007
576 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from Plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns on the Bankside to the pulpit of St. Paul's, John Stubbs's biography is a vivid portrait of an extraordinary writer and his country at a time of bewildering and cruel transformation.
"Part of the job of this biography," writes Stubbs, "is to trace the strands between these personae and point out the unity underlying them." He succeeds admirably." - PW.
"Highly readable...Stubbs manages to make Donne seem recognizable and sympathetic...the inhabitant of a world that has long since disappeared." - Andrew Motion, Guardian.
"Rich, generous and capacious....Its triumph is to show how the brilliant, abrasive, phenomenally direct voice of the Songs and Sonnets...deepens and darkens, cracking sometimes under the harsh strain of his middle years, only to re-emerge in the humane and powerful sermons of his last decade." - Hilary Spurling, Observer.
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