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
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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.


Reviews

"Fresh, delightful ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"She urgently and admirably wants us to appreciate that he understood the extremities of human experience and the transformative powers of language like no one else before or since."

Helen Hackett· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Katherine Rundell titles her new biography of Donne Super-Infinite."

Adam Kirsch· The New Yorker Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

"At the heart of Rundell's thrilling reassessment of Donne's oddly hinged career is an argument for transformation rather than rupture ..."

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

"the biographer Donne has been waiting for."

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

"a trim, highly readable study ..."

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

"To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness"

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

"Donne turns his scholars into lovers, and as a result books about him tend surprisingly often to rise up to the sparkiness of their histrionic, funny and endlessly fascinating subject ..."

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

"This comprehensive study is poetic in its own right; scholars, students, and poetry lovers, take note."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Rundell's own style can dazzle, though at times the wit feels a bit strained ..."

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

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