Religious Poetry and Prose of John Donne / John Donne: Contemporary Critical Essays

Religious Poetry and Prose of John Donne. Edited and mildly modernized by Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 1999. xiii + 97 pp. $12.95 (paper).

John Donne: Contemporary Critical Essays. Edited by Andrew Mousley. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. xi + 233 pp. $49.00 (cloth).

It has been twenty years since I picked up a volume of John Donne's works. I expected that the writings of this seventeenth-century Christian pastor would be quaintly distant, linked in my mind with the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. I recalled some of his famous lines, made more famous by later writers' repetition of them: "Death be not proud. . ." "No man is an island. . ." "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for you. . . ." I thought I would find Donne's religious writings frequently familiar, mildly inspirational and safely archaic.

With that mindset, I found "The "Prayers" were mostly what I had expected. The language is formal, ritualized, and distanced by...