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Donne loved the trans-prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing – ‘transpose’, ‘translate’, ‘transport’, ‘transubstantiate’. In this Latin preposition – ‘across, to the other side of, over, beyond’ – he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born trans- formable. He knew of transformation into misery: ‘But O, self traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstantiates all/And can convert manna to gall’ – but also the trans- formation achieved by beautiful women: ‘Us she informed, but transubstantiates you’.
Super-infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones
Donne would have done well in today’s society. He was a man who was not adverse to self promotion, a net-worker and social climber who makes the Middleton sisters look shy and retiring. He took pains to look fashionable in a way that looked as though he had taken no pain at all and, most pertinently, loved to add superfluous prefixes to words hence the title of this book. Infinite was not enough for Donne it had to be the super-infinite. The workmanship involved in putting together this biography is impressive! I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about his life and works and certainly wish I had such an accessible bio in college.
If she had to recommend just one Donne poem for someone to start with, which would it be? “Love’s Growth,” she replies without missing a beat, then recites the opening stanza: “I scarce believe my love to be so pure …” The final “more”, she adds, is a play on his wife’s name. “So it’s one of those poems which is beautiful for all of us, but different for her.” Fresh, delightful . . . [Rundell] nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived . . . Written with verve and panache, this sparkling biography is enjoyable from start to finish.”
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne|Paperback Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne|Paperback
It definitely covered a lot of ground, but I haven’t come away with as strong a impression of who John Donne is as I did with Christopher Marlowe when reading The World of Christopher Marlowe .England had been so shot through with religious violence in the sixteenth century that there was ample evidence to cast either side as villain. Mary I, a Catholic, had burned at least three hundred Protestants, and now with Protestant Elizabeth on the throne a concerted effort was made to channel national ire at the Catholic minority. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs had been published in 1563, nine years before Donne’s birth, and its frontispiece illustration served well to remind those in doubt of where the country stood: on one side Catholics with bulbous noses are seized by gleeful demons, while on the other Protestants with aquiline profiles burn in the fires of persecution and rise to glory. Rundell's insight into Donne's poems is spot on and her love for his verse the pulse of the book. She clearly understands the discipline and attention it takes to read Donne and the resounding glory of the conceit. It would have been my loss to to have missed this wonderful book. "Super-Infinite" is ... I don't know what word best captures it: Filled with insights about John Donne and his writings? Yes. Smart and insightful? Sure. Informative? Yes. Fun to read? Absolutely!
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of
There can be no better companion than Rundell in a bracing pursuit of John Donne. Throughout this sure-footed and eloquent biography, she encourages us to listen attentively to his many voices, and to the voices of those around him.” Edward Alleyn: the greatest actor of the age, the man who made Faustus his own, Master of the King’s Bears, and possessed, in the etchings, of a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice skate.
Katherine Rundell brings us a fresh take on the poems, prose, and protean identities of a 17th-century master of the English language. Super-Infinite is both humble and flashy. Humble because John Donne’s life and work lie on a path well-trodden by scholars; flashy because Rundell is a playful, incandescent stylist who brings scintillating insight to her subject.” Emergent Occasions” 1624. The second one is almost a paraphrase of his famous poem, No Man is an Island. 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. 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. Prizewinning children’s-book author Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, delivers a fresh, delightful biography of John Donne (1572-1631). A staunch admirer—she places the “finest love poet in the English language” alongside Shakespeare—her book is an “act of evangelism.” Donne “was incapable of being just one thing,” writes the author. “He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” She nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived. A “lifelong strainer after words and ideas,” a youthful Donne kept a commonplace book at Oxford—now lost; Rundell suggests its technique of literary alchemy influenced his method of writing. At London’s Inns of Court, he mostly studied frivolity and wrote some “bold and ornery and intricate” poetry that “sounded like nobody else.” As Rundell reports, The Oxford English Dictionary records some 340 words he invented. Donne dressed fashionably and wore “his wit like a knife in his shoe.” In 1596, bereft after his brother’s death, Donne was “keen to get away” and tried his hand at privateering. Working for a wealthy friend, he wrote numerous rakish, erotic verse with stylistic “tussles and shifts,” often untitled, which he shared with others rather than publish. Alongside poems that “glorify and sing the female body and heart,” Rundell writes, “are those that very potently don’t.” It should come as no surprise, she notes, that someone who lived through a plague, watched many of his 12 children die young, and had suicidal thoughts wrote some of literature’s greatest poems about death. Long dependent on patronage to cover debts, “slowly, in both doubt and hope, Donne’s eyes turned towards the Church,” and he was ordained. King James appointed the “star preacher of the age,” famous for his metaphor-laden sermons, Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621. passionate about the ruthlessness of illness. He knew the futility of our endeavours. The isolation of illness being one of its most deleterious effects.
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