"A very modern biography of John Donne-the poet of love, sex, and death-by bestselling children's book author and superstar academic Katherine Rundell"-- Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English...

A religious story about a man's journey to find the Promised Land. He experiences many conflicts and adventures along the way, among them giants, dragons, and other perils.

A biography of Milton's formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton's development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton's best-known works from this period,...

In this brilliant biography, an acclaimed Oxford professor rediscovers a poet whose rich contradictions confound his monumental image and immerses us in the rhythms and textures of his world, from his childhood into his idiosyncratic belief system and his strange, electrifying imagination.

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...

A critically acclaimed account of Milton's life and work from an eminent Harvard scholar, this book focuses on the development of Milton's ideas and his art, revealing how he was the first writer to self-consciously construct himself as an 'author'.