Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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Did listening to this biography by Katherine Rundell improve my understanding of John Donne and his life?

Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones

He took his galvanising imagination and brought it to bear on everything he wrote: his sermons, his meditations, his religious verse. In the twenty-first century, Donne’s imagination offers us a form of body armour. His work is protection against the slipshod and the half-baked, against anti-intellectualism, against those who try to sell you their money-ridden vision of sex and love. He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought. It’s not that he was a rebel: it is that he was a pure original. They do us a service, the true uncompromising originals: they show us what is possible. Most of everything she's written I am already familiar with- I breathed Donne for 6 months. As soon as I read "Air and Angels" in the beginning of my junior year, I knew- this is it. This is my poet, my JP. And again during my senior year, as soon as I knew my senior thesis would be a defense on the metaphysical poets, I lived, breathed, ate: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Marvell. 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.” I have long been under the allure of Donne’s poetry. It appeals to me for its wit, and the way words are juxtaposed, to form concise leaps into fresh concepts. I thought I knew quite a bit about Donne, but there were many revelations in this book, some welcome and some unwelcome, but I remind myself that the poet and the physical, human man must serve to illuminate not dominate the work. That is what K Rundell has done. The life and flaws are part of the man not the poetry, though his poetry is infused with his spirit.He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Donne wanted to know something larger than infinity. It was absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry. Beautiful, radical, true. The way Rundell brings Donne and Donne’s poetics to life is a joy, shot through with deep readings, compassion, perspective, wit. Super-Infinite revitalizes what a literary biography can be: an urgent, visionary approach but also endlessly intellectually generous, open-hearted, and bold. It’s alive, and it made me feel more alive, as if clamouring to get closer to Donne, mid-sermon, jostled, trampled and completely okay with that.” What really made the book sparkle for me is how brilliantly Rundell situates Donne's life and work in the context of his time. (Think "Wolf Hall," only a lot more accessible and a lot fewer Henry's and Tom's.) Shakespearean England was a perilous place. From time to time, Catholics were hunted down, hung, tortured, drawn and quartered. Donne's own brother, in fact, caught hiding a priest, was tortured and sent to a "plague-ridden jail."

Super-Infinite — the life and rhymes of John Donne Super-Infinite — the life and rhymes of John Donne

But what remains is a miracle; because a colossal amount of Donne’s work has been rescued from time’s hunger, remarkable in the period for its variety and sweep. Declaring his poetry to have the power to be transformative, Rundell says that her book is a biography “and an act of evangelism”. It is successful. 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.Through all the lives he lived – seaman, private secretary, dean – his poetry and writings remained constant. Always looking for a new angle on well established conventions, his poems are alive with wit and sometimes ridiculous argument pushed to the boundaries of acceptability. Rundell offers many snippets of his poems but I feel the book would have benefited from more and lengthier extracts. There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’ They were heavy metal, Donne’s letters; there is little romance in them, and a great deal of twisting and hammering at his pain to force it to take the shape of some meaning . It is one kind of making…..it says a great deal about him, that he was the kind of man who demanded of pain that it shunt you closer to infinity.