super infinite the transformations of john donne reviews

He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year-old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of Parliament-and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and Literary Hubįrom the standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. Winner of the 2022 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography PrizeĪ Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of 2022Ī New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction He chooses, instead, to embrace it, to embody it, to knit it together into one motley fabric, and Rundell does the same in a lovely biography worthy of its subject. God knows how people at the time palmed them off as their own! I know I might have.ĭonne is great because he refuses to shy away from contradiction.

His early love poems, perhaps the best ever written, were copied down and passed from hand to hand only to be copied and passed on again. And while Donne certainly loved his fashion, it was his poetry that propelled his reputation forward. The Donne whom Rundell gives us is–as I’ve noted–a man of contradictions, but he lived at a time when it paid to dress double, to wear one thing within and another without. So it’s something of a miracle that Katherine Rundell’s biography of Donne is such a pleasure to read. In fact, his brother Henry died of plague while serving time in prison for harboring a Catholic.

Donne’s family tree contains instances of death by all three. And if you did survive childhood, there was Yersinia pestis waiting in the wings, which cared naught for your title nor your faith, but disfigured and killed indiscriminately all those it infected. Of course, given infant mortality rates at the time, you were quite fortunate to reach an age where you could profess anything at all. For merely professing the wrong faith, one could be drawn and quartered in the public square. John Donne was a man of many contradictions living in England at a rather complicated time.

Super infinite the transformations of john donne reviews