Reviews for John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography

The average rating for John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-22 00:00:00 Randy Tasker This book probably deserves four stars. Stubbs' writing is learned, balanced, and clean. He knows a lot and he says a lot and he writes well. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about John Donne. So why three stars? I usually try to respect an author's own terms and intentions and not play the "This book isn't good because I wish it were something else" game. BUT... I kinda sorta wanted more about the poetry. Stubbs has English lit degrees from Oxford and Cambridge but he doesn't seem to think that poetry requires interpretation or that it matters at all. He has a rather naive assumption about poems just being about an author's feelings, and those feelings are usually "I like this girl" or "I wish I had a better job" or "The people around me are ridiculous." Granted, there are a lot of poems, including poems by John Donne, that carry one or both of those messages. But they're also, y'know, POEMS. They have lots of meanings and patterns and require interpretive work. Stubbs doesn't do that. He has precious little to say about Donne's poetry and instead takes his religious pamphleteering more seriously. And by "seriously" I don't mean that Stubbs cares too much about the ideas in Donne's pamphlets--he cares about how Donne is trying to advance his career by pleasing various political factions while not offending others more than he has to. Because that's why anybody writes anything. What I guess I'm saying is that this biography is, like the biographies of Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro, operating on the assumption that the men of early modern England were motivated almost entirely by careerism, the purpose of which is for a man of intelligence but middling status to rise in society, own nice things, and associate with powerful people. That is to say, early modern poets are exactly like contemporary elite-university professors. They work hard to please the right people and their overriding anxiety is that they never get promoted or make more money. They actually like their patrons and earnestly seek more favor from them. As for their beliefs, they're totally middle-of-the-roaders who think everyone should let everyone else do and believe whatever they like but they're perfectly willing to take on "extremists" in order to please their benevolent masters. The upside of this approach is one learns a lot about the political and religious controversies of the time, so long as one takes for granted that all religious controversies are really political controversies, and "political" in these cases always means "the competing concerns of nations and interests groups" and not "people who have stuff protecting it from people who don't have stuff." All that matters is how a member of the cognitive elite was able to work the system of economic and administrative elites. The best parts of the book come towards the end. Stubbs is very good on King James and Edward Alleyn, both of whom have personalities that come off as way more interesting than Donne's. Stubbs doesn't end up say too much about Donne's own personality because he's trying to avoid the "randy Jack Donne grew up to be serious Dr. Donne" story that Donne himself promoted, Isaak Walton popularized, and continues through the biographical tradition. Stubbs doesn't want to tell that story even though it seems like the best way of understanding the man.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-04-08 00:00:00 Scott Bedell I marvel at the unstinting flow of writing of the highest order from the pens of gifted biographers working today. Mr. Stubbs numbers among these persons, and in this life of John Donne he has given us a clear-eyed and incisive examination of the life of an extraordinarily intelligent man, whose political skill, ingenuity and agility as well as his extraordinary capacity to please, mollify and placate just the right people allowed him to survive and prosper in Stuart England, potentially a highly dangerous place for anyone afflicted with talent and ambition. Highly recommended.