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

"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

"But if there is an overarching argument, then it's about Donne as an 'infinity merchant' ..."

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

"It's an ingenious way of making his difficulty sound exciting as well as formidable ..."

Adam Kirsch· The New Yorker Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

"frankly brilliant ..."

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

"It is a forgivable tendency of evangelising critics to mistake the enthusiasm a poem inspires in them for a quality of the poetry itself ..."

James Marriott· The Times (UK) Read review ↗ Near the Top

"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 has an engagingly idiosyncratic and playful style ..."

Alexander Larman· The Guardian Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"It's a tempestuous tale ..."

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

"It is equal to its subject: a sensitive, witty, slim and abundant book."

John Phipps· Financial 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

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