Donne: More Than Kisses, Letters Mingle Souls

In her new book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Bookshop|Amazon), Oxford University scholar Katherine Rundell notes that the 17th-century cleric’s love poems are famously difficult to unravel, but well worth the effort. “Meditation XVII” from Donne’s 1624 work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and seuerall steps in my Sicknes is the source of the now-familiar English phrases No man is an island and for whom the bell tolls, the latter of which became the title of an Ernest Hemingway novel. This is part of a complete episode.

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