I defy anyone to read her descriptions (“he wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in”) or her summaries (“Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity”) and not be wanting more. This, however, is a wonderful achievement, full of idiosyncrasies, some revision of past narratives about Donne, and, most of all, an intoxicated love of Donne in his all his chaos and glory.ĭeclaring his poetry to have the power to be transformative, Rundell says that her book is a biography “and an act of evangelism”. Literary critics might want more poems under the microscope. Historians might want more of the wider context. Inspired by John Carey’s approach of forty years ago that the life of Donne leads to a more comprehensive reading of his work, Rundell paints vivid pictures of Donne and his times which open the mind and stay there, as well as readings of the poems that launch us into fresh space. Super-Infinite is a delight - quirky, learned, anecdotal, fun, and insightful. A bestselling author of children’s books, a Fellow of All Souls, a night climber, and a tightrope walker, she is just the person to get to grips with the childlike curiosity, the mature intellectual dexterity, the plunges into soul darkness, and the balancing act of passionate worldly desire and a deep longing for God, which Donne’s life holds together all in one.

The author of this biography, Katherine Rundell, also contains multitudes. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” It notes that he loved the trans- prefix on words because he believed that we were creatures born transformable and it observes that the one constant running through his life and work is his steadfast belief that we, humans, “are at once a catastrophe and a miracle”. From his earlier days, when excited by the nakedness of his body, till later in life, when he feared the nakedness of his soul, Donne’s life was as inspirited by love, language, sex, and God as much as it was complicated by ambition, illness, money problems, and the death of six of his children.Īs this new biography comments, his restless hungers and desires made Donne “incapable of being just one thing. IT WAS the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman who unapologetically announced: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Nearly three centuries before, another poet, John Donne, was communicating a similar truth about himself through his poems, essays, and sermons.

John donne super infinite