The Love Poems Of John Donne

The customary cant about being an American Indian goes like this: Indians must live in wide open spaces; they must define their spirituality by chant, dance, and drum; they must pass down their traditions with reverent care; and they must offer tourists Indian art and Indian experiences to take home. On one side of commercial Indianness there is sloppy sentimentality, and on the other, speechless hatred. But what of those born between, like W.S. Penn, with an Anglo parent demanding that Indianness be abandoned and an Indian parent clinging to all that can be held? What of those who grew up in the cities? Can they express more than confusion, frustration, and rage? Are there alternatives to assimilation, submission, or revolt? In All My Sins Are Relatives Penn finds in his own family three generations trying to come to terms with their differences and with their Indianness. Within its pages, Penn describes learning the depths of his love for his grandfather, to whom he dedicated this book. "As arrogant as youth can be, I was often too busy silently grading his grammar to pay real attention and see what he was giving me." Among the gifts was an awareness of what a story could tell, what it could conceal, and what it could never tell. His grandfather inhabited a different sense of time, and it was a long while before Penn lived there, too. When he did, he was back again with a story, working out how Indian writers wrote poetry and prose. In the work of other Indian writers and in his own Penn found that, although white and Indian cultures cannot mingle, they can be bridged. All My Sins Are Relatives is a bridge.

Born in 1572 in London England, John Donne was an English Jacobean poet of exceptional skill, whose poetry was known for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor. While Donne was well educated and his poetic talents considerable he struggled for much of his life to provide for his family. Having published only two volumes during his lifetime, he was not a professional poet. Despite this his legacy on the world of poetry is a significant one. In this volume you will find a representative selection of his "love-poetry," a type of poetry popular in Donne's time. In total seventy-two passionate and erotic poems comprise this volume of "The Love Poems of John Donne."

Excerpt from The Love Poems of John Donne But Donne never made poetry his profession, and for the greater part of his life he was far more scholar and preacher than poet. His nature was extraordinarily complex. Heaven and Earth contended in it with a force that made his life a succession of alternating exaltation and depres sion, loftiness and baseness, rapture and despair. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy, from sacred devotion to lust, he conveys an astonishing range of emotions and poetic moods. Constant in his work, however, is an intensity of feeling and expression and complexity of argument that is as evident in religious meditations such as 'Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward' as it is in secular love poems such as 'The Sun Rising' or 'The Flea'. 'The intricacy and subtlety of his imagination are the length and depth of the furrow made by his passion,' wrote Yeats, pinpointing the unique genius of a poet who combined ardour and intellect in equal measure.