John Donne

Seeks to supply a sounder and more uncluttered text for reading than has been heretofore available, together with variant and delected passages for study/

"Major Works is the finest single-volume anthology of influential philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's important writings. Featuring the complete texts of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue and Brown Books: Studies for 'Philosophical 'Investigations,' and-On Certainty, this new collection selects from the early, middle, and later career of this revolutionary thinker, widely recognized as one of the most profound minds of all time."--BOOK JACKET.

Here in one volume are the top one hundred poems, as determined by a survey of more than 1,000 anthologies - the poems in English most frequently anthologized, the poems with the broadest, most enduring appeal. With insights into the historical period in which each poem was written, the verse form used, and connections among poems, this is the ideal introduction to poetry, as well as a treasury for the dedicated reader.

This volume presents the only "authorial" manuscript ever discovered for any of John Donne's sermons. Jeanne Shami's discovery of this manuscript in the British Library's Royal Manuscripts Collection - as a miscellaneous and unattributed sermon text - is indeed a cause for celebration among Donne scholars. Manuscript sources exist for only 16 of Donne's 160 sermons, and this is the first to be identified as corrected in his own hand. The implications of Shami's discovery are profound. Transcribed immediately after Donne delivered the sermon on November 5, 1622, this manuscript version and its corrections give us important new information about Donne's habits of composition and revision. In addition, the existence of an authorial manuscript version requires us to reconsider the textual status of George Potter and Evelyn Simpson's ten-volume California edition of Donne's sermons published in 1962. Their edition has, to date, been relied upon as "definitive." Potter and Simpson's version was based on the only printed version of this sermon in Fifty Sermons, printed in 1649. The substantive differences between this newly discovered manuscript and the version printed in 1649 reveal much about the political considerations impinging on Donne in 1622. The revisions suggest that he changed his sermons for stylistic and rhetorical reasons but also for political ones, and that his intentions for the sermons may have changed over time. In this parallel-text edition, Shami introduces the work by placing this sermon in its textual, cultural and scholarly contexts. The sermon itself is reproduced in facsimile, and Shami provides a complete transcription for each page. The sermon is also keyed to its earliest printed source, that published in 1649, and also to volume and line numbers in the Potter and Simpson edition.

Donne's earliest prose works, 'Paradoxes and Problems', were probably begun during his days as a student at Lincoln's Inn. These witty and insouciant paradoxes defend such topics as women's inconstancy.