Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Donne endured a life where political intrigue, economic welfare, and unhealthy living consumed one’s will to survive and find a modicum of security and comfort.He was imprisoned, rejected as a suitor, marginalized as writer, and left to flounder in poverty for most of his life. At first his trials and failures offer a glimpse of a soul that wanted to soar above the fray with verse and determination. Later they turn into the acceptance of roles that would shelter him from these realities.His prose was cutting and his poetry embedded in wanton grief, lust, and rejection; often his goals of riches reveled in his wants and their waylaid status and realization. Inopportune obstacles, empty prospects and feckless deployment of his limited resources and a super charged spirit that had nowhere to go left him stagnant in his state of transient belief in of a super infinite self.He had to navigate treacherous political times compounded by the demands of a household he was Iill equipped to provide for and the rigors of finding a voice in his writing that would inspire more adulation than contempt. It was the latter challenge that filled him with most misgiving and trepidation. His verse was both his path to success and to damnation.It was a curious turn from skeptic to believer that secured him the comforts of modest wealth and position that he so labored after. However, these life changing improvements only seemed to lessened his allure and ability to see a positive force as a ballast for himself and his family.In that journey he never turned out to be someone whose core belief led him to a place where he found true solace, for he seemed at the end of his life as dispirited and distracted by the times around him as he did in his youth.Katherine Rundell offers a solid accounting of Donne, his life, his talents, and his challenges. Her narrative also offers a good understanding of the times in which he lived that defined so much of who he was and what he was able to accomplish.

Katherine Rundell pulls of a literary high wire act as challenging as those attempted by her Subject. Such a pageturner that is also full of detail, familiar verse and the more obscure texts only releasrs the reader in wonder at the final epigram. Know everything of Donne or nothing this is a smart romp of a read.

I've never read a biography quite like this one. It seems like there is a lot of research and thought behind it, yet it never gets bogged down to the point of becoming uninteresting. On the contrary, I could hardly put it down. The author passionately expresses her admiration for John Donne while being critical when she needs to be. An excellent book that I highly recommend!

When we talk 17th century England we think about Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and the complicated soap opera of the house of Tudor. But Katherine Rundell plucks this mysterious character and regales us with a life lived before we as a civilization came up with careers. John Donne before becoming a religious man did many other "careers."Therein are the adventures that we follow and she sets the stage of a time when most rules of today did not exist. The world of the 1600's is offered with brilliance and a bit of a sense of humor. Worth the time.

Katherine Rundell emphasizes nothing so much in her appreciation of John Donne as the value he placed on words; coining neologisms and original metaphors, from his early days as a Renaissance poet to the sermons preached at St. Paul’s, Donne demanded of his readers and listeners a high degree of attentiveness to his turns of phrase.It’s appropriate then that his life would be so enigmatic; an ordinary life would not need such attention to detail. Given the distance of some four centuries, Rundell does a superlative job of tracing the oddities of Donne’s life: born to a Roman Catholic family with its share of martyrs, he converted to Anglicanism, became a courtier, eloped, failed at diplomacy, begged money from his friends, only to finally rise to a position of wealth and stature as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.It’s his poetry that he is, of course, most remembered for and some readers may be disappointed that Rundell does little to illuminate it. But the book is all about a new generation discovering the fascinating and enigmatic Donne. After all, whole libraries can be filled with criticism of his verse.Having a flair for the poignant phrase herself, Rundell’s Super-Infinite is an excellent way to get acquainted with his life and times. I highly recommended it, particularly to the young, who only know of such somber lines as, “for whom the bell tolls”. A super-infinite universe awaits.

Donne is a cornerstone of western poetry. The story of has life is incredible! What amazed me the most was seeing his unique gifts and personality expressed in his verse through all the highs and lows of his life, while he stayed the same person. His brilliance was incandescent!

A perfect choice for the modern non-expert reader seeking to know more about the English poet and clergyman, John Donne. A biography that is the opposite of a dry-as-dust effort.Katherine Rundell spins her story based on an admittedly thin historical record of Donne's life. She keeps to the personal facts as they are, while enhancing her narrative with vivid descriptions of life--and ever present death--in early 1600s England.It is gratifying and rewarding to read a book on the life of a master of the English language by one with similar gifts.

Reading biographies can sometimes be a slog. Not this bio of John Donne. Here the scholarship is presented in a conversational style enlivened with tiny touches of wit shined into some of the darker corners. Imagine that! A serious, richly insightful intellectual biography that is a delight to read.

I have to admit that I knew fairly little about John Donne before reading this. His most famous, 'No Man is an Island...' work seemed to highlight his extreme piousness and serious nature. Of course, though, Donne, like everyone, was many things. His life was often one of extremes. He knew poverty and the confines of the Fleet prison. He was born of ruined Catholic landowners (his mother the grand-niece of Thomas More) and grew up during the reign of Elizabeth I and fear of Catholic plots. His mother's uncle was arrested, he visited his uncle in the Tower of London, possibly attended at least one execution (that of the Queen's favourite, the Earl of Essex) and his beloved brother, Henry, died in prison after hiding a priest. He knew illness, saw plague sweep the city, suffered fevers throughout his life. He lived through the reign of James I and saw Charles I come to the throne.He was a man who looked for advancement. Who turned to the law, became secretary to the man who prosecuted the Queen of Scots and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Became a protestant and later a famous preacher. He wrote of love and death, married Anne More, daugher of Sir George More, who was not impressed with the match and was thrown into prison before becoming reliant on one of her relatives for some years. Twelve pregnancies later, Anne was dead. Donne, rather like Charles Dickens many years later, seemed somewhat resentful of his children and of the power that women held through his desire for them. However, on his death he did split his money equally between his remaining children, regardless of gender. Like so many of us, he changed throughout his life and was many things. The author centres on his writing and she also creates not only an excellent portrait of the man (noting that this might be more detailed had not the Great Fire of London meant so many documents were lost) but also a fascinating account of the time and of how Donne adapted in order to live within in.

It is good to have a Donne worthy of the twenty-first century - for those of us who cannot handle a poetic extract much longer than four lines, and for those of us who like our critical judgements in the form of snappy sound-bites (e.g. 'He took his galvanising imagination and brought it to bear on everything he wrote'). I lecture on Donne and tried out some of Ms. Rundell's pronouncements on Donne's intellectual development on my students, to their great amusement- for example, that 'with his fine blue eyes and aquiline nose, Wotton was to prove a true ally'. But, on balance, we learnt more about how Ms. Rundell's mind worked than Donne's, and this was not edifying. In fact, her book rather contradicts her introductory contention: 'In the twenty-first century, Donne's imagination offers us a form of body armour. His work is protection against the slipshod and the half-baked, against anti-intellectualism, against those who try to sell you their money-ridden vision of sex and love. He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought.' I resent having been seduced into buying this book by the extravagant puffs provided by writers I admire. I do wish writers wouldn't scratch each other's backs in this manner. In fact, this is a rather fashionable show-off book which will be well forgotten before the year is out. Academically, it adds nothing to our understanding of Donne and it promotes him in an overblown and distorted manner.

Katherine Rundell focusses on John Donne as person first then also as poet, quoting his poetry illustratively. She provides a telling social history, highlighting the horrors of the pervasive persecution of Catholics, including the unimaginable cruelty of the judicial punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered, the awful suffering and huge mortality of the plague, the frequent loss of children to disease. This context presumably shaped human thought, responses and reactions, but Rundell doesn’t pursue the connection. In fact, Donne appears to approve of the deterrent effect of an agonising death (p257). Neither was he kind to his children.So whilst Rundell eulogises Donne as poet, there is no analysis of Donne as philosopher. Rundell writes that ‘it would be absurd to try Donne anachronistically as a misogynist’ (p127). But why? Either morality is entirely relative, or prophetic figures challenge society against objective ethical standards, in the way of Christ and the Judaic prophets. But not Donne. His skill is more in arcane word artistry. Donne knew extremes of poverty and wealth, which he navigated opportunistically through careers of lawyer and famed money-making preacher. He appears obsessed with sex and death. He ridicules sexual love more than he celebrates it. His most famous ‘No man is an island….for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee’ is the clearest and most resonant of his poetry. The portrait which emerges of Donne is of a self-obsessed unpleasant man, rather than a great poet of love.

A good basic test for criticism is, should you read this, or just read Donne himself? Unless you already know him very well, you should just (re)read Donne.It’s hard to say why. The prose is lively and striking, there’s no academese. There’s a lot of interesting background about London and the period. But you never get a really in-depth sense of the man, perhaps because biographical details are all too clearly sparse; and you never get a really in-depth sense of the ideas in the poetry. So: if you don’t know Donne and wouldn’t appreciate him, this isn’t for you. If you don’t know him and would, then read Donne instead. If you do know him, then you probably want something less breathless and meatier. Overall, this is like those history podcasts where they spend 20 minutes making jokes and 10 minutes giving you the bare bones of their topic.

Will be not just the definitive understanding of Donne of our time, but ought to transform the way author biographies are written. The prose throbs so perfectly in synchrony with the language, texture and spirit of the subject that each sentence not only describes Donne, but enacts him. It's a tightrope walk and a hell of a bold and stylish experiment, one which would I think, thrill Donne himself.Another reviewer on this site misses the point somewhat when they note, as an example of what they misrecognise as overcooked prose: '[ …] “labyrinthical” does not exist. She means “labyrinthine”.' The word in fact does exist. It first appears in - and most likely was coined by - Donne.