super infinite the transformations of john donne reviews

He was a man who suffered from surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love. 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 (Sept.Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

(“The word most used across his poetry, apart from ‘and’ and ‘the’,” Rundell notes, “is ‘love.’ ”) Rundell’s prose is stylish and playful, referring, for instance, to Donne’s religious treatise Pseudo-Martyr as “so dense it would be swifter to eat it than to read it.” This comprehensive study is poetic in its own right scholars, students, and poetry lovers, take note. Donne was keenly aware of sorrow, Rundell shows, and believed “we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.” But he was also a biting satirist who mocked social expectations through his writing, and a romantic. Donne “reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London,” Rundell writes as she traces Donne’s life from his birth into a Catholic family during the strife of the Protestant Reformation through his formal education, appointment as a member of Parliament, marriage to Anne More (which got him thrown into Fleet Prison More was a minor and her family didn’t approve the marriage), and his eventual renunciation of Catholicism for Anglican priesthood. Scholar Rundell ( The Wolf Wilder) explores in this thoughtful biography the life and art of poet and priest John Donne (1572–1631), positioning him as an imaginative, witty, and sensual figure.

Super infinite the transformations of john donne reviews