The facts of Donne’s life are well known. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed act of evangelism, showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times-unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age.
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
Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
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