During April, a friend and I challenged each other to write one poem per week in honor of National Poetry Month.

And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne. Donne was made of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in ...

Death mark of the poet John Donne, engraved by Martin Droeshout, London 1632. (Photo by Bettmann / Getty) During the 16th century, the English were unusually spirited in their destruction of ...

Finally a biography of John Donne that captures his eccentricities, his contradictions, his fabulous twists and turns, his trickiness, and—as one critic has put it—his thinking “awry and squint.” ...

T he title of Katherine Rundell’s biography of the Renaissance poet and divine, John Donne, comes from his sermons, which few people read today. In a funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert (the ...

Ms. Rundell is the author, most recently, of “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” from which this essay has been adapted. The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

John Donne’s reply to Marlowe, perhaps written to amuse fellow residents at the Inns of Court, where he was once Master of the Revels, also reads a bit like satire. “Come live with me ...