Home Books Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

by Katherine Rundell

Farrar, Straus and Giroux ·2022 ·352 pages ·Poetry
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About This Book

From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way 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 man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.


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Reviews

"That enthusiasm is both intellectual and erotic ..."

Anahid Nersessian· New York Review of Books Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne's misogyny head-on ..."

Lara Feigel· The Guardian Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Rundell is keenly aware of the misogyny of a good number of these poems, and defends Donne without excusing him, pointing out that it's a mistake to conflate the poet with the poem's speaker ..."

James Shapiro· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"the biographer Donne has been waiting for."

Nicola Shulman· The Telegraph (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"On reading this extraordinary biography you are left concluding that her talent, like that of her hero's, must somehow be super-infinite."

Kathryn Hughes· The Times (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"The moments at which Rundell is a little conventional permit us to distinguish her own true invention: and through it, perhaps, Donne's ..."

Daniel Swift· The Spectator (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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