Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

by Katherine Rundell, Simon Vance (Narrator)

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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, History, Audiobook, Biography Memoir, Literary Criticism

8 pages, Audio CD

First published April 12, 2022

About the author

Katherine Rundell was born in 1987 and grew up in Africa and Europe. In 2008 she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her first book, The Girl Savage, was born of her love of Zimbabwe and her own childhood there; her second, Rooftoppers, was inspired by summers working in Paris and by night-time trespassing on the rooftops of All Souls. She is currently working on her doctorate alongside an adult novel.

Source: Katherine Rundell

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rundell's writing is the star of this show: it's sparky and textured, original and alive - if she wrote a novel I'd read it like a shot - but, somehow, Donne the man sort of slips between the floorboards of this biography and never really emerges as a fully-fleshed (ha!) person. Rundell's vast enthusiasm is almost there in his place, a kind of simulacrum for the man. Maybe the very complexity of Donne and his various metamorphoses is too much for a biographer to capture because this is the fourth biography I've read and none of them feel complete.

The Bald John Donne: A Life from the 1970s remains the standard scholarly biography: dusty? yes; dry? yes; but all the detail we need for studying Donne is here and meticulously referenced. Carey's John Donne, Life, Mind, and Art is typical of Carey: opinionated, uneven, wild speculation with no evidence, but provocative and stimulating; the more recent Stubb (John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography) is a modern take using frameworks of ambition and power to assess Donne's life but, despite that title, doesn't engage with the fact that for Donne (and his peers) religion was bound up with faith, something we might struggle with in our secular society. And Stubb doesn't engage with the poetry. And now Rundell where, I'd say, her own lively vision obscures Donne.

I never felt his presence, Ann is no more than a shadow, and this doesn't engage in detail with either Donne the poet or the 'other' Donne (Dr Donne as opposed to Jack Donne, man about town, as the traditional split goes): the man who wrote Biathanatos on suicide at a time when people were still burning for the sake of religious doctrine just isn't there.

So I'd recommend this to anyone who has never read about Donne's life before: this is lively and pacy and makes Donne more or less understandable to a modern readership. Personally, though, I found it says nothing new but in effervescent prose.

[K.J. Charles]

Absolutely outstanding, possibly the best biography I've ever read.

This has a huge amount of erudition: there's limited existing information about Donne's life, but tons of cultural and historical context. The analysis of the poems and writing is woven in throughout and really well explained. The author is clearly a huge Donne fan but not obsessively (I had to laugh when the recommended reading section concludes with a warning not to go near a notoriously unreadable polemic of his), and has a clear eye to his obvious and many personality defects while also bringing across what was clearly incredible personal charm.

And it is so *readable*. Here I am sure Rundell's background as a children's novelist kicks in, because the tone is perfectly judged: never dry even while conveying a huge amount of info, constantly engaging, often funny. It feels like having a really interesting person talk to you about something they find really interesting. Even the image choices are terrific. (A guy Donne worked with was known to a friend of his as 'Camel Face'. Some biographers would mark that as totally irrelevant to the matter at hand; Rundell makes sure we get a picture. Wow, the guy looked like a camel.)

That rare thing: a bio that both humanises the subject and makes his whole era feel accessible--not modern, but nevertheless containing people fundamentally like us. and never loses sight of the magic of Donne's writing. A triumph.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

To begin: I stipulate that nothing I write, no matter how effusive or glowing, will make anyone say 'Golly, I've got to read that new book about John Donne!' (I will further stipulate that no one who follows my reviews is ever likely to say 'Golly.') Had someone told me that I'd truly enjoy (enjoy!) a book about a 17th century poet cleric whose writings I found infernally confounding in grad school, I would offer a non-committal smile and change the subject.

It would have been my loss 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!

John Donne (who lived during the reigns of Elizabeth and James) led a very full life: student, soldier, attorney, prisoner, poet, courtier, cleric. Rundell tells us all about it. What he did, what his works tell us about him, how his mind worked. Interesting stuff, to be sure, made more interesting by the enthusiasm for Donne the author obviously feels. Donne, she says, is "One whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you." And: "He wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe; he wanted it to flash out at unexpected moments." This is not the stodgy language of an academic work. Nor is this: "To call anyone the “best” of anything is a brittle kind of game — but if you wanted to play it, Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since." Poems about sex are not what come to mind when thinking of John Donne, the man who gave us "Death be not proud" and "No man is an island." And yet...

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."

Understand, this was literally plague-ridden: The years in which Donne lived were marked by frequent outbreaks -- 1593, 1603, 1625, with smaller outbreaks in between. The 1603 outbreak, Rundell tells us, was particularly deadly. Based on London's current population it would be the equivalent of 880,000 dead Londoners in less than three months. Unimaginable.

Knowledge of medicine was not terribly advanced, of course. “Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay," Rundell informs us, "they [students of the Merchant Taylors’ school] were flogged for the crime of not smoking." One popular prescription, said to work with numerous diseases, were made of mummies* (preferably “the fresh unspotted cadaver of a red-headed man)… aged about 24, who has been executed and died a violent death”). How oddly precise. (*NB: Mummies have not been judged by FDA to have efficacy in treating Covid.)

Infant mortality was shockingly high. Depending on the region, anything from 10-40% of live-born babies died before first birthday. (Donne lost 6 children.) Women’s lives reflected these dire numbers. Donne’s wife Anne was pregnant 12 times in their 16 years of marriage. “She would," Rundell reminds us, “have spent her entire adult life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth, and often both at once.”

The pages of “Super-Infinite” are filled with such information, along with insights onto the workings of court, class, and church, sweetened here and there by the occasional striking anecdote. An example: A mapmaker named Opocinus made maps in which countries were depicted as parts of the human body, “with Avignon, the French seat of the Pope, as the heart; Corsica and Sardinia are small turds.” One country, depicted as a women, bears an inscription “almost impossible to read [that] appears to say ‘vent commiscemini nobiscum,’ ‘come copulate with me.’ "

I should stop here, I know, but I want to add one or two more things to give a taste of the book, like this about a young woman named Elizabeth Wolley who was said to be beautiful. Rundell wryly notes, “They said the same of Anne Boleyn, a woman who in paintings looks like an unimpressed headmistress.” (Rundell introduces us to James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, 1st Earl of Carlisle, "alias Camel face" and George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury," who hunting one day aimed at a deer and instead hit and killed a gamekeeper.)

Donne is, of course, the subject of this remarkable work, and Rundell looks at him with an admiring but levelheaded eye. He was a complicated person who wrote complicated poems and sermons. “He would write a twelve-line sonnet that would take you a week to read,” Rundell notes (handily summing up my grad school experience). And: “To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar.” (This was at a time when sermons lasted anywhere from one to three hours! Donne's sermons attracted thousands of listeners, so many in fact that sometimes people were nearly killed by the crush.)

I know, I know. Engaging as it is, this is not a book that’s going to attract a large audience (although it’s gotten rave reviews in England, where Rundell lives). But if you’re willing to step out of your comfort zone, you could do far worse than to pick up “Super-Infinite.”

My thanks to Edelweis and Farrar Straus, Giroux for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review. (And my thanks to Krista for bringing this remarkable work to my attention.”)

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

I couldn’t say what prompted me to read a biography of John Donne — in my mind he was frozen as the stern elder preacher who would chillingly warn down the length of a gnarled and bony finger it tolls for thee — so I am delighted to have so enjoyed Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite, reminding me that even those dusty old poets, forever frozen in woodcut portraits on foxed anthologies’ frontispieces, were once young and striving and pulsing with life. As Rundell reports, there is only the sketchiest of biographical information available on Donne, but with an exuberant and colourful writing style, she brings his world alive and makes the case that not only was Donne one of the greatest innovators of the English language in his day, but that he arguably remains the greatest writer of desire in English of all time. With such big claims satisfyingly supported, I was entertained and educated throughout; delighted after all to have taken this plunge on Donne. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London. It’s traditional to imagine two Donnes — Jack Donne, the youthful rake, and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, a split Donne himself imagined in a letter to a friend — but he was infinitely more various and unpredictable than that.

By the time he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral by King James I, not only did parishioners risk their lives to hear Donne speak to crushing crowds, but his sermons were often collected and published and widely scrutinised. As for his earlier work, Donne published a few manuscripts but no poetry in his lifetime and what has survived to us is all from letters that he wrote to friends; poems that were often copied and passed on, so that there are now something like four thousand copies of his poems, in 260 manuscripts, with no definitive versions of any, and only one poem extant in Donne’s own hand — repeatedly, Rundell proves that writing a biography of Donne is a daunting task. But as Donne lived at the same time as Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and Johannes Kepler (and probably met each), Rundell is able to sketch the outline of Donne’s life by evoking the greater world around him. And from Donne’s beginning in an outlawed Catholic family (he probably saw an uncle hanged and drawn and quartered for his “apostasy”), to his years of striving for a position at Court and his unsanctioned marriage to a young upper class lady (the beloved Anne would provide Donne with twelve children in sixteen years — seven of whom would survive her own death following her last childbirth — and Donne vowed in Anne’s eulogy to never love again, and he did not), there are definitely enough known facts of his life to make him come alive on the page. And throughout, Rundell quotes generously from Donne’s poetry accompanied by her own colourful commentary:

(Sir Philip) Sidney’s woman’s hair is gold, her shoulders ‘be like two white doves’ and her whole person ‘out-beauties’ beauty itself. Donne’s counter-blazon takes that tradition and knifes it in a dark alley. He writes how the sweat of his own mistress’s brow is ‘no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets’, while on his companion’s mistress:

Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,
Like spèrm’tic issue of ripe menstr’ous boils,
Or like the scum, which, by need’s lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra’s starvèd men did draw
From parboiled shoes and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blest.

Honestly, the exuberance of Rundell’s metaphors were half the joy in reading this book:

• 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.

• He wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in.

• For all their length, his sermons were never sombre or staid: they were passionate performances, attempts to strike a match against the rough walls of the listeners’ chest cavities.

• To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar. To modern ears, they are winding, elongated, perambulating things; a pleasure that is also work.

• From failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you.

Again: Super-Infinite was a pleasure to read and Rundell’s admiration of Donne is infectious; I am delighted to have picked this up and can enthusiastically recommend it.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

This is an engaging biography that shows Donne in all his triumphs and failures, his genius and his foibles. His journey from Catholic boy who watches several members of his family die for their religion to the protestant Dean of St Paul’s. The serial flirt who remained constant to his wife throughout their marriage and after death. The unsuccessful diplomat whose words drew huge crowds. He was all these things encased – in another example of his contradictions – in a beautiful yet constitutionally frail body.

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.

As a metaphysical poet Donne was preoccupied with the relation between the body and the soul, how they are indistinct from each other. This is much the same questioning as his close contemporary, Menocchio, had in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, and makes one think about the spiritual climate of the times. Rundell does a good job of painting the background to Donne. It is full of witty contextualisation and makes the book a pleasure to read. Who knew for example that James I had this affliction,

“(His tongue) was too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full of mouth, and made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth.”

The chapters skip along with wonderful headings such as ‘The Inexperienced Expert of Love’ and ‘The Anticlimatically Married Man’ and tend to stick to known facts, happily admitting when evidence is missing or there are unexplained gaps in the subject’s life rather than padding out with endless conjecturing perhapses, maybes and its possibles, a condition too many biographies are afflicted with. This gives us a better grasp on Donne as he is a man tethered to actual events rather than a wispier ghost who could have been multiple things and keeps the book short enough to maintain interest from first to last page.

Sex, death and God. If any (or all) of these subjects interest or affect you then Donne is the poet for you and this biography is a deft introduction.

[Christina Baehr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sobbed my way through the final chapters. Extraordinary. Review to come when I recover.

UPDATE: I keep thinking I’ll be able to write a cogent and helpful review of this book. And then I still can’t. I’m having trouble putting my finger on exactly why I found this odd little biography so very affecting. I think there are several reasons.

One has to do with the fact that Rundell hasn’t played the role of an impartial academic. She’s basically half in love with John Donne. And the more I think about this, the more I think that this is actually a very truthful and refreshing way to do history. It has much more in common with the biographies that GK Chesterton wrote of some of his favourite authors and saints than most of the 17th century history books I’ve read. Rundell sometimes feels like a kid taking you by the hand to tell you about his latest obsession.

Please—more history books written with this level of undiluted, wholehearted passion!

Another is that Rundell doesn’t rush in to filter Donne. She’s honest about those of his sentiments that grate on her, but without wringing her hands unduly over them, and she doesn’t ever try to explain away his religion through a modern lens.

This is a biography that honestly acknowledges the role the biographer plays in the book without putting herself centre stage, and also acknowledges (without a hint of a sneer) that Donne’s life glowed with an unshakeable belief in the realities of heaven and hell. There’s very little chronological snobbery here.

The final thing that moved me was how she was willing to linger over the really horribly hard parts of his life. The intellectual compromises, the regrets, the time of poverty, the sickness, the fixation with ending his life (unacted upon). This was a considerable chunk of Donne’s life, and it would be easy to shrug off or skip over when writing about him. As someone now in midlife, I found it painful but ultimately redemptive to read. Rundell is unblinking in her portrayal of the darkness of these years. And yet—Donne held on to life, at times only by his fingertips. Because Rundell allows us to walk through the valley of the shadow of death with him, it makes the fruitfulness of his later years all the more beautiful and satisfying.

This would be a good short biography to read alongside Ecclesiastes.

(Noting for those who follow me for family reads—this is an adult book. Seedier sides of life in 17th century England are discussed.)

[Anisha Inkspill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aside from reading the poem The Flea I know very little about the poet John Donne.

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

Kind of.

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 .

But I still enjoyed listening to it.

[Cliff M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fell for the marketing of this book. Again…

Sure, John Donne was a man of many hats, but so were a lot of other people during the English renaissance. Either because they had to be or because the opportunities existed for them to be so. My mistake was in not reading his poetry and deciding I liked him / knew him all along before deciding to find out more about him. Without the context of his poetry, it is hard to understand what all the fuss is about.

[Lauren James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adored this. Katherine's writing is always utterly magic, and her thoughts on Donne + his relationship with creativity were so fascinating. At first I really revolted against the idea of poetry as a disposable and evolving form of currency, that has value for what it can give you socially, rather than a creative art. But I was really brought around on the concept by the end of this. So much insight into 17th Century culture through the lens of one man's life.

[Chad D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, with lots of subtle and not-so-subtle humour. Clearly the author enjoys John Donne very much and is a kind of kindred spirit particularly to his wit and poetry and zest for light and darkness, and her voice and his (pretty liberally quoted) work very well in counterpoint. There's a good bit of weird Renaissance lore thrown in for good measure, facts that set Donne off as a man of his time as well as for all time.

The implicit thesis of the book, as stated in its title--that Donne underwent so many transformations that he kind of contains us all--isn't as convincing as it might be. He seems like a man fairly consistent in his idiosyncracies though set in a lot of different circumstances. Age seems to have changed him, maybe a bit more than normal, but I'm not convinced yet that he was particularly protean. And if he was, the proteanness, proteanity, whatever, was in the direction of being more religious, and that side of him, I'm very sorry to say, the side that I'm most interested in, this author gives air to but just does not understand as much as the other aspects of Donne's personality. The end of the book fizzles into "Donne is a triumph of the human spirit" and "Donne understands that we are all each other's best hope," which seems to me to be not at all what Donne says or means in most of the last two decades of his life.

tl;dr good on the context, wonderful voice, pretty good on the psychology, but might've missed the whole point.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Donne is not a writer with whom I am super familiar. He popped up in college English courses here and there; mostly I know what is in the Norton Anthology and The New Oxford Book of English Verse (the one edited by Helen Gardner, not Q or Ricks). I have a very slender chapbook of Donne that my wife gave me when we first met in Oxford 23 years ago; that lives on my desk and I occasionally read it. The rector at our church mentioned this biography in a homily and it got good reviews, so I decided to try it.

Rundell gives a lively account of Donne's life, with discussions of his various works interwoven. She always looks at his writings in the context of his life at the time. Rundell focuses on how Donne transformed himself over the course of his life, as a rake, a lawyer, minor hanger on at the royal court, diplomat, priest and finally Dean of St Paul's. Often not very admirable (few great writers are), clearly hard to live with, but always interesting. There is also a fair amount about life in Elizabethan/Jacobean England.

Among the interesting bits I picked up: Donne invented a lot of words; he accounts for the first recorded use of around 340 words in the OED.

Rundell writes in a somewhat breathless literary/academic style. Definitely not a book written for tenure (that is a compliment, if you are innocent of the academy). She has sometimes splendid and sometimes startling turns of phrase:

"owning one's own language is not an optional extra"

"Language, his poetry tells us, is a set, not of rules, but of possibilities"

"a pun so obvious it might as well be a little sketch of a penis"

"The titles of the books add up to an assassin's hit list"

"in the most famous portrait, she has a look of scepticism powerful enough to burn rubber"

"a book so dry and relentless that it has a dust-storm quality to it"

"the way the human heart darts about like a rat"

"a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice skate"

Clearly Donne has found his biographer and Rundell her subject.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Agile & approachable prose Katherine Rundell did very nicely here it's a biography that strikes a rather harmonious balance for me. Anybody could take this as a way into Donne it's so pleasant and KR injects proceedings with all the contemporary anecdotes we need.

Anyway lovely Donne had a hell of a life being a Catholic a lawyer (in training) soldier privateer dandy secretary MP (twice) poet and preacher (Protestant) at St. Pauls. I'd include him as one of those lives that one doesn't even need to find an interest in his work to be curious about. It helps that I am

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is his lifelong quest and lifelong disappointment: that we cannot be struck daily by lightning. This is the same Donne who, in the Holy Sonnets (impossible to date for sure, but perhaps written around 1610), seeks a force so great that it will sweep away doubt, exhaustion, distraction, and leave something stripped back and certain”

Everyone who reads knows that there are just certain writers that stir you. You find them by chance or recommendation, and then you find their words lodged in your brain permanently. John Donne’s poetry expresses this longing in terms so original and vivid that they took up permanent residence in my brain when I was 18.

I’ve never really looked into his story, but now I’m so glad I waited until Katherine Rundell could write this downright funny (seriously!) biography about him. She combines a deep knowledge with a light touch and this makes for an engaging story about this paradox of a man, and all of his passions and pursuits. “His voice was so constantly in motion: turbulent, shifting between triumph and anxiety, bravado and dread, irony and humility.” Rundell appreciates those tensions that made his work so compelling to me. I’m so glad she told his story.

[Ellison · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Elizabethan age was unimaginably chaotic and dangerous by our standards - people were hung, drawn and quartered, or sometimes simply burned to death, for their beliefs. Rundell brings that era to life in a prose that is full of play and wonder - reflecting Donne’s own wit and daring.

“Humanity, as he saw it, was rotten with corruption and weakness and failure - and even so it was the great light of the universe. He gloried in mankind: if the inner world of each was extended outwards, ‘Man would be the giant, and the world the dwarrf.’ Few people would turn to Donne’s poetry or prose, with its twisting logic and deliberate difficulty, for solace - but you might turn to him to be reminded that for all its horror, the human animal is worth your attention, your awe, your love.”

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Picked this up on a whim and really sped through the first third, but the rest was drudgery. Rundell's enthusiasm is effusively contagious. I would like to actually read some John Donne. But I also don't particularly enjoy biographies that spend so much time shouting to the heavens about their subjects' idiosyncratic genius, their once-in-a-lifetime stupendousness. It just exhausts me, even if the subject in question is clearly special in a variety of ways. But whatever. Cool guy. Rundell is less cool, but I'm glad she found an outlet to show off her love for Donne. Feels like she really needed to get this out.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite poets whose work I have often taught so I was always going to have to read this biography. Katherine Rundell is particularly good when analysing Donne’s poetry, especially his remarkable range of juxtaposed imagery, and she also does a good job of relating his writing to the different stages of his life. It’s easy for literary biographies to become very dry and academic but Rundell manages to avoid this with her own skilful and entertaining use of language as well as plenty of humour.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I studied John Donne's poetry for A Level English but knew little about his life, so I thought I'd pick up this highly-garlanded new biography. As everybody has said, Katherine Rundell's writing is exceptional. She has the gift of writing beautiful, evocative line after evocative line ('He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute'; 'Time eats your paperwork, and it has eaten some of his'; 'Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity' - and all this just in the introduction!) But I agree with other reviewers that some of this prose rather gets in the way, and I'd add that the very short chapters broke the flow of the narrative for me. And maybe this is just me having wrong expectations for a biography, but I wanted more of the poetry; there actually isn't as much quotation as I'd expected. Obviously, I could look it up myself, but it would have been nice to have it embedded in Donne's life story. I'm excited to hear that Rundell is working on an adult novel, though, because she's obviously an incredible, versatile writer. 3.5 stars.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Rundell performs an act of public service in her analysis and appreciation of John Donne. Rundell righteously confirms that her book will be a biography, but also an act of evangelism-- on behalf of Donne for modern readers, and she makes a good case for Donne to be considered side-by-side with William Shakespeare.

In the book's introduction, Rundell reveals a quote that Donne "was often hopeless, often despairing-- and yet still he insisted at the very end 'it is an astonishment to be alive and it behooves you to be astonished.'"

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne places the writer Donne well within his time and social circle. There are substantive passages detailing Queen Elizabeth and King James. Still, the focus is largely on Donne’s primary roles, including poet, husband, father (to a lesser extent), preacher (most definitely), and member of parliament (multiple times).

If there is any surprise in the narrative, it is how sparingly Rundell quotes Donne's most famous poetry. This feels like an explicit and conscious choice, or perhaps Rundell's throughline, to follow Donne in his lifetime throughout his many transformations.

Donne's personal and professional struggles and years of study and waiting are also documented. Rundell champions Donne's intellect, writing, and creative use of language. Several instances of Donne's addition and invention of new words are attested (if not published) years or decades before the official first dates of words being coined.

One quote (above, in the second paragraph) that might have felt a bit too sentimental or perhaps even banal at other times, hit me with added force in these days of fascistic chaos in America and thus I'm still dwelling on it-- if only to find some hope and positive energy: Donne "was often hopeless, often despairing-- and yet still he insisted at the very end 'it is an astonishment to be alive and it behooves you to be astonished."

Recommended reading.

[Perrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sublime historical journey through the life of John Donne, who I had never heard of before and now admire hugely. Rundell's passion shines through here, weaving effortlessly from the grief to the joys of Donne's life. History non-fiction can sometimes be slow and unwieldy to read, but this was an absolute delight from start to end. Adored this, and there's at least one person I want to lend it to straight away.

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully vigorous biography of a poet I have loved since my teens.

[Alex Nagler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Rundell's "Super-Infinite" tracks the life of that most metaphysical of English poets, John Donne. An academic text as much as one for lay readers, it tracks his life from childhood to death, with trips to prison, court, and St Pauls in between. I personally would have appreciated more intertwining of the text, but Rundell does admirably with the verses she does choose to reflect upon a time or place. Donne remains as vibrant, as divinely human today as he was then.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for review.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this swiftly moving book about the life of John Donne, an alternate approach to biography of the cradle-to-grave accumulation of data that sometimes drags down larger attempts. It is written with wit and verve, and a sensitiveness to Donne's preoccupations and foibles - essentially a modern day style that mirrors Donne's thematic concerns.

Donne might be the second best poet ever after Shakespeare but he clearly equaled Shakespeare in the depth of his commentary on human existence. This would be a superb book for those seeking a pain free introduction to Donne, but also a pleasure for the long term fan. While I wasn't completely bowled over (hence four not five stars), it is a solid addition to the Renaissance library of enthusiastic readers.

[Caughtintheworldofbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

Having never spent a long time in the sphere of John Donne - only having read a handful of his poems for a few semimars at University - I really had no idea what kind of man John Donne was or what kind of life he led. Katherine Rundell is a skilful resurrectioner bringing this ever-changing figure back into skin, bones, soul and personality. The extent of her research and textual knowledge is staggering and captures a Donne who was 'constantly transforming. He was a one-man procession: John Donne the persecuted, the rake, the lawyer, the bereaved, the lover, the jailbird, the desparate, the striver, the pious, John Donne the almost dead and reporting from the front line of the grave.'

When I had encountered Donne's writing before, I had never taken particularly strongly to it. What Rundell achieved in Super-Infinite was to provide the tools and layered contexts that unlock how to read his work because you can then read him as a person. Sometimes that person isn't particularly nice or attractive, as Rundell acknowledges, but he remains tangibly human and not a thing from history. From his early years as religious outsider, visiting family at the Tower of London for treason, impeccably dressed rake, part of Elizabeth I's fleet against the Spanish Armada, lawyer, to converting to Protestantism and becoming a firm fixture of James I's court and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, Rundell keeps Donne's writing central and helping the reader understand where his mind was during these multiple transformations.

I couldn't believe that after marrying Anne in secret, Donne had the insane audacity in a letter to his father-in-law to include a PUN of his own name - 'I know this letter shall find you full of passion; but I know no passion can alter your reason or wisdom; to which I adventure to command these particulars: that it is irremediably donne...' This is the same man that poured his whole self and pain into writing Bianthanatos, a defence of suicide, and then agonised over it that he asked a friend to let it never see the light - but not destroy it - to which it never did in his lifetime. I was also fascinated how poets, such as Alexander Pope and Thomas Parnell, edited Donne's poetry to be 'better' as they did not enjoy the way he wrote. For example: 'so much that he [Pope] took Donne's Satires and 'versified' them, so that they scanned and made what he thought was nice, proper sense. In his hands Donne's line, 'Sir, though (I thank God for it) I do hate/Perfectly all this town' becomes 'Yes; thank my stars! As early as I knew/This Town, I had the sense to hate it too.'' I feel this example really emphasises how different Donne's writing was. By the end of the book when Rundell includes some of the forgeries people wrote of his work after the death, it is so easy to spot the difference because they just cannot capture his voice.

My only real quibble with the book was that sometimes it jumped back and forth chronologically where the chapter before would go into detail about the state of Donne, emotionally especially, in a particular time period, and then go back further in time so you can't build this continuous picture of him. It was only in a few places and I appreciate there could have been multiple editorial reasons for this, but from a reader's perspective, it was sometimes disorientating. But this was my only criticism. Overall it was a triumphantly engaging and stunning insight into this ever-transforming man.

I'll finish my review with a quote that an anonymous poet wrote across the wall over Donne's grave in charcoal:

Reader! I am to let thee know
Donne's body only lies below
For, could the grave his soul comprise
Earth would be richer than the skies.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that I knew fairly little about John Donne before reading this. His most famous, 'No Man is an Island...' work seemed to highlight his extreme piousness and serious nature. Of course, though, Donne, like everyone, was many things. His life was often one of extremes. He knew poverty and the confines of the Fleet prison. He was born of ruined Catholic landowners (his mother the grand-niece of Thomas More) and grew up during the reign of Elizabeth I and fear of Catholic plots. His mother's uncle was arrested, he visited his uncle in the Tower of London, possibly attended at least one execution (that of the Queen's favourite, the Earl of Essex) and his beloved brother, Henry, died in prison after hiding a priest. He knew illness, saw plague sweep the city, suffered fevers throughout his life. He lived through the reign of James I and saw Charles I come to the throne.

He was a man who looked for advancement. Who turned to the law, became secretary to the man who prosecuted the Queen of Scots and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Became a protestant and later a famous preacher. He wrote of love and death, married Anne More, daugher of Sir George More, who was not impressed with the match and was thrown into prison before becoming reliant on one of her relatives for some years. Twelve pregnancies later, Anne was dead. Donne, rather like Charles Dickens many years later, seemed somewhat resentful of his children and of the power that women held through his desire for them. However, on his death he did split his money equally between his remaining children, regardless of gender. Like so many of us, he changed throughout his life and was many things. The author centres on his writing and she also creates not only an excellent portrait of the man (noting that this might be more detailed had not the Great Fire of London meant so many documents were lost) but also a fascinating account of the time and of how Donne adapted in order to live within in.

[Crystal Hurd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rundell is a master wordsmith, which makes for a fine biography. I must admit, a John Donne biography was not what I predicted to be a "best book of the year" but enter Super-Infinite. I have a new-found perspective (and respect) for Donne and his works after reading this, high aspirations for any biographer. Rundell is just a dang good writer who illuminates, with care and craft, the life and work of her subject.

I may reread this in a few months. It's THAT good. ❤️

[Julien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a thoughtful and rich look at Donne's life. I love how his writing is so interweaved with the narrative of his life Rundell unfolds — why else would we be reading about him, after all? For a writer whose poetry in particular I have loved for a long time, I knew surprisingly little about him, and this book gave me so much nuance and understanding of Donne, his social position, the context and the London he lived in. Elegantly written and with obvious care for its subject, too. Really lovely.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like Rundell to write my biography. Her facility for language makes her the perfect person to write Donne’s biography.

[Steven Doran · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the first 20 minutes I wished I was listening to In Our Time, and I wasn’t taken by the connective notion of endlessness that gives the biography its name. I never did find the idea of super-infinity compelling in this context, but I started really enjoying the book at the point Rundell moved on from Donne’s achievements to tell about his life and times as a man of letters and of the city.

I mostly know done from the serious and worthy musical settings of his poetry by 20th-century composers, so I knew he was very clever and a star preacher, and that his poems blurred the line between love of Jesus and desires of the flesh. I didn’t know he was was critical of poetic technique and traditions, or socially wicked, or a sailor, or that his contemporaries didn’t think poetry was what he was very good at, or that he was caught up in fads of moustache styling and micro-blogging (well, commonplace books). He was the sort of popular figure who, like Charli XCX or Paris Hilton today, both armed himself with populism as much as he criticised it.

His London sounds like a playground in the way New York is for the women of Sex and the City, which was possible because he has the mix of smarts and pecuniary advantage that let living come easily.

[Sylvie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

From failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you.

This is so much what it feels like to read the poems:

His sermons attracted such large crowds that they would have to outside in the cold in their thousands. Apparently, they have tested the courtyard at St Paul’s and found it was designed to reverberate the sound. The attraction of the sermons may have lain in the language, or their undertone of pity for the human condition.

And did he know about the human condition. He was often ill,

passionate about the ruthlessness of illness. He knew the futility of our endeavours. The isolation of illness being one of its most deleterious effects.

Like most artists, he mined his experiences in order to translate them into precious things. This is how it is described, propelling us into our contemporary world. Is it little wonder that he was an inspiration to T S Eliot, among others?

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.

There was misery and grief when some of his children, and later Anne his wife died. She bore him 12 children so it was a hard life, lived within precarious means. The marriage had begun with a clandestine romance that put him in jeopardy. It is not until he became Dean of St Paul’s that he achieved material security.

My only disappointment is that there is so little on Anne in the book.

Anne was born too late for the burst of enthusiasm for female learning that erupted between 1523 and 1538 inspired by Catherine of Aragon.

What a sad piece of information this is to explain the wife of a great poet.
I was at Loseley Hall where she grew up, a country mansion with extensive grounds, ideal setting for a Shakespeare play. I was acting as an extra, and when I said I loved Donne’s poems, I was lent a copy of his poems by the present owner. And yet, in Donne’s time, Anne’s father Sir George More angrily contested the union. He had higher aspirations.

K Rundell does not spare the reader details of his obsession with death. What I did not know are his thoughts on suicide. He wrote a book on the subject. Knowing it would ruin him – it was a mortal sin - he entrusted it to a friend, asking him not to publish it.

KR admits he can be difficult to read. She goes on to say that the infinite is not easy. In this biography, she has conveyed the way in which the infinite is also present in the make up of the poet JD who was born in 1572. A man of many facets and contradictions, a more extreme specimen of what it is to be human.
It was the world of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and a flourishing of knowledge, both mystical, and scientific.
Metaphysics was very much the order of the day. The society and world he inhabited is shown in all its glory and miseries. This was a world of constant plagues, fierce religious divisions and unimaginable cruelty. They permeated his poems and in particular his sermons. The language sprang out of all those dichotomies. There was intellectual fun to be had with the thought and language, this is how the paradoxes that baffle are explained and put into context:

The “extravagance of paradoxes” was the pleasure and point of them. - the possibilities that lie inside pointing out absurdity. Donne discovered that if you force together the two Venn diagram circles of reason and the absurd, in the overlap there is a weapon….”

“they are but swaggerers, quiet enough if you resist them.”(Donne)

It may have been deliberate and self conscious, but beneath it lay an emotional truth, which is what we absorb from his poetry, indeed any good poetry.

There is a lot of humour, not least when painted portraits or their subjects are described. No need of a photograph to picture this:

a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice skate.

It is difficult not to be moved by the two quotations from “Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions” 1624. The second one is almost a paraphrase of his famous poem, No Man is an Island.

Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born Giants: that reach from east to west, , from earth to heaven, that do not only bestride the sea but span the sun and firmament at once: my thoughts reach all, comprehend all.” We exceed ourselves: it’s thus that a human is super infinite.
Most of all, for Donne, our attention is owed to one another.

“When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of a book but translated into a better language; And every chapter must be translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by Age, some by sickness some by war, some by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library whereby every book shall lie open to one another.

Here is a lovely image to take away. It is not in the body of the book but in the acknowledgements:

To Barbara and Peter Rundell I owe absolutely everything, but especially, in the context of the book, gratitude for pinning Donne’s poetry next to the bathroom sink when we were small.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm new to the life and works of John Donne. OK, I knew the quote No man is an island. I thought Katherine Rundell was a magnificent writer. The prose sparkled and shone.