One Equall Light: An Anthology of Writings by John Donne

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John Donne’s enormous legacy to English literature is of equal significance in prose and poetry, in religious and secular writing. With popular knowledge of Donne mainly confined to his poetry, One Equall Light makss an important contribution by focusing on his prose writings which remain largely unknown. Comprise of nearly one thousand extracts, some eight hundred of these are drawn from his sermons, letters and other prose works. This anthology is preceded by introductory essays that tell something of the story of the man and his meaning for us today, of the distinctive characteristics of his writings as a poet, propagandist and preacher, and of his final years as Dean of St Paul’s. It is in the anthology, however, that Donne speaks for himself. Twin themes run through this collection: humanity and divinity, the sacred and the secular, penetrating and informining each other in Donne’s creative, restles imagination. In all his writings, his presence is inescapable, revealing something of what Rowan Williams in his Foreword terms as Donne’s ‘whilly extravagant and often dark imagination’.