An exemplary literary biography. Stubbs has all the appropriate skills: lucid prose style, deep historical knowledge, and a deftness in reading poems with a marvelous economy in his comments. I am grateful to Stubbs for aiding me to see John Donne more accurately and sympathetically, a person and a poet.
Highly readable...Stubbs manages to make Donne seem recognizable and sympathetic, and also the inhabitant of a world that has long since disappeared.
John Stubbs treats Donne as 'a living concoction of differing, frightened spiritualities' in this vivid portrait, this rich and full life, of an English immortal enmeshed in his time. The result is a wonderfully precise study of a great poet, a soul formed and reformed. It is a stunning biographical debut.
Rich, generous and capacious....Its triumph is to show how the brilliant, abrasive, phenomenally direct voice of the Songs and Sonnets...deepens and darkens, cracking sometimes under the harsh strain of his middle years, only to re-emerge in the humane and powerful sermons of his last decade.