The Holy Sonnets

The nineteen poems that comprise John Donne's Holy Sonnets are works of anxiety and spiritual crisis. Most of the sonnets are thought to have been written between 1609 and 1611 but were not published until two decades later—two years after Donne's death. The Holy Sonnets explore the poet's fear and trembling when faced with the realisation of his mortality and self-described unworthiness as a recipient of God's grace and mercy. Donne's poems navigate through his doubts in search of a divine comfort and assurance in the hope of salvation and eternal life. With an introduction by poet John Daniel Thieme.

What might contemporary thinkers learn from prayer? The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche suggested a possibility: that prayer teaches us how to attend. This book explores the precedents of Malebranche s advice by reading John Donne s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the art of holy attention. This requires an understanding of attention s role in Christian devotion, which he provides by uncovering a tradition of holy attention that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals. Donne s devotional poems occupy a unique position in this tradition. Marno identifies in them a devotional model of thinking whose aim is to experience an affect of attention. Marno s argument is framed by compelling close readings of Death, be not proud, Donne s most triumphant poem about the resurrection. Elsewhere, Marno takes up Claudius s prayer in "Hamlet" and Saint Augustine s account of attention in the "Soliloquies" and the "Confessions." The book ends with a Coda on the aftermath of holy attention in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche."

Thieme's first collection of nineteen poems is drawn from the lost magic of a waning romance. The poems are a search for meaning for "a love / that once, too briefly, thought the stars / and their fatal arcs made sense", but the answers are elusive. The tone of the poems is both intimate and haunted; seeking redemption through love, but tempered with a lament for its fragile impermanence and inevitability. Thieme's the ghost dancers offers nineteen fragments of a confession: an elegy for the vanishing of a love's sense of grace as it turns to the desolation of grief and the permanence of absence.

Holy Sonnets by John Donne are a series of nineteen poems originally written in 1609-1610 and have been tied to Donne's conversion to Anglicanism. These poems of John Donne have become some of his most highly regarded and most popular works. Included are Holy Sonnet 10 ("Death be not Proud") and Holy Sonnet 14 ("Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you").

This classic edition of Donne's Divine Poems contains an extensive and invaluable critical apparatus by Helen Gardner.

William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets are read against the background of concepts of the soul during the early modern period. This approach provides new insights into concepts of interiority and performance as well as a new understanding of the soliloquy in both poetry and drama.