John Donne (1571-1631) (John Donne | The Poetry Foundation) was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution; family members were imprisoned and tortured. He moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Then there were years as the impoverished, frustrated father of 12 children (six died), a period of grief after his wife’s early death and his final efflorescence, at once unexpected and inevitable, as a clergyman who was swiftly promoted to Dean of St Paul’s.
Katherine Rundell (Katherine Rundell | All Souls College) has given us here a superb biography of the poet whose work she considers a “completed meshing of body and imagination”. The contention is that the body thinks and feels, not some abstract entity which is co-incidentally connected with it. Donne has the ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” Rundell writes. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.”
In Super-Infinite, the author shows us the many sides of Donne’s extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times. In so doing, she reveals Donne as one of the most remarkably powerful minds in English poetry, and as a lesson in living.
** A Sunday Times bestseller **
** A Guardian, Spectator, TLS, New Statesman, Daily Mail, Prospect and Telegraph Book of the Year**
This biography has been critically applauded and comes highly recommended. Check if it is in stock at your local library by consulting the online catalogue here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
352 pages in Faber & Faber
First published 2022
ISBN-13 : 978-0571345915
Katherine Rundell