John Donne: The Reformed Soul
10 best books like John Donne: The Reformed Soul (John Stubbs): Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story, The Metaphysical Poets, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Young Eliot: A Biography, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
| Author | Leo Damrosch |
| ISBN | 0300164998 |
Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became...
| Author | Stanley Wells |
| ISBN | 0375424946 |
From one of our most distinguished Shakespeare scholars, here is a fascinating, lively, anecdotal work of forensic biography that firmly places Shakespeare within the hectic, exhilarating world in which he lived and wrote.
Theater in Shakespeare's day was a burgeoning “growth industry."...
In this important and influential anthology Dame Helen Gardner has collected together those seventeenth-century poets who, although never self-consciously a school, did possess in common certain features of argument and powerful persuasion which have come to be described as 'metaphysical'....
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0393320936 |
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full...
| Author | Stephen Greenblatt |
| ISBN | 0226306593 |
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and...
| Author | Adam Sisman |
| ISBN | 0670038229 |
The story of the legendary friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge
The friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced dazzling results. From it came Lyrical Ballads, the volume that kick-started the Romantic Movement in England. Rarely have two such...
| Author | John Drury |
| ISBN | 1846142482 |
For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.
'Love bade me welcome . . .'
'Teach me my God and King . . .'
George...
| Author | Benita Eisler |
| ISBN | 0679740856 |
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context...
| Author | Robert Crawford |
| ISBN | 0374279446 |
A groundbreaking new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets
On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, Robert Crawford presents us with the first volume of a definitive biography of this poetic genius. Young Eliot traces the life of the twentieth century’s...
| Author | Michael Gorra |
| ISBN | 0871404087 |
Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady...
| Author | Brenda Wineapple |
| ISBN | 1400044014 |
After p. 125
'Tis a puzzlement - this Book -
'Tis - or 'twas -
Or -
Perhaps a bit of both -
At End
I must add this title to the short list of biographical narratives that I consider perfect (not that my selection bears any significance beyond the edge of my desk), in the...
| Author | Seamus Heaney |
| ISBN | 0374248532 |
This might seem an odd choice: a collection of lectures about poetry, some of them to an Oxford audience. Sounds stuffy as can be - but it isn't. Wherever they were first heard, each lecture was written to be understood by anyone, and send them back to the works they cover.
The best piece, and perhaps...
Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, and the list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his...
| Author | Edward Copeland |
| ISBN | 0521498678 |
Leading scholars present a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to Jane Austen's works in the contexts of her contemporary world, and of present-day critical discourse. Beside discussions of Austen's novels and letters there are essays on religion, politics, class-consciousness, publishing...
| Author | Jonathan Bate |
| ISBN | 1400062063 |
“One man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s...
| Author | David Riggs |
| ISBN | 0805080368 |
"Riggs brings it all together brilliantly, assembling all evidence of Marlowe's life and adding to that a wider and deeper focus . . . Superb."--Los Angeles Times
The World of Christopher Marlowe is the story of the troubled genius, raised in the stench and poverty of Canterbury's abbatoirs,...
John Donne (1572-1631) is perhaps the most important poet of the seventeenth century, and has often been referred to as the founder of the metaphysical genre. His poetry is highly distinctive and individual, adopting a multitude of tones, images, forms, and personae. This collection of Donne's verse...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 0375705406 |
Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets.
Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed...
| Author | Michael White |
| ISBN | 0060933887 |
Giordano Bruno challenged everything in his pursuit of an all-embracing system of thought. This not only brought him patronage from powerful figures of the day but also put him in direct conflict with the Catholic Church. Arrested by the Inquisition and tried as a heretic, Bruno was imprisoned, tortured,...
