There were many times when she discusses Donne's poetry I found myself wanting her to talk about other stanzas and the best turning points, feeling like she missed the best parts! But I think she was trying to maintain the pace of the book which is hard to keep while writing about both his life and explicating pieces of his poems along the way. Did listening to this biography by Katherine Rundell improve my understanding of John Donne and his life? 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. Super-Infinite is a stylish, scholarly and gripping account of Donne’s ecstatically divided self, ‘hurried by love’ and by man’s ‘inborn sting’: a work super-relevant to our own troubled times.” 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. Historians might want more of the wider context. Literary critics might want more poems under the microscope. 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.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne review

What a Super-Infinite delight is this, this is the rich, textured and excellent biography that I have always wanted to read about Donne - it brings the poet, his poetry, his many lives and his turbulent Elizabethan and Stuarts times vividly to life.” passionate about the ruthlessness of illness. He knew the futility of our endeavours. The isolation of illness being one of its most deleterious effects. 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.There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’

BBC Sounds - Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell - Available BBC Sounds - Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell - Available

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. 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. 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. From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the great-niece of the Catholic martyr Thomas More. She sounds to have been formidable, unafraid to assert herself: a woman of whom it was whispered (erroneously) that she carried the head of Thomas More in her luggage when she travelled. Donne’s father, also John Donne, was an ironmonger, though not of the horny-handed, rugged variety; he was warden of the Ironmongers’ Company. The family had once owned magnificent estates, before they had been confiscated by the Crown in the various Tudor shake-downs of Catholic landowners. He married, in Elizabeth, the daughter of a musician and epigrammatist who had played for Henry VIII; so Donne was born into a family who had known the smell and touch of a king.

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. Emergent Occasions” 1624. The second one is almost a paraphrase of his famous poem, No Man is an Island. 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. Donne was not sent to school. He was missing very little; the schools of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were grim, ice cold metaphorically and literally. Eton’s dormitory was full of rats; at many of the public schools at the time, the boys burned the furniture to keep warm, threw each other around in their blankets, broke each other’s ribs and occasionally heads. The Merchant Taylors’ school had in its rules the stipulation, ‘unto their urine the scholars shall go to the places appointed them in the lane or street without the court’, which, assuming the interdiction was necessary for a reason, suggests the school would have smelled strongly of youthful pee. Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay, at Eton they were flogged for the crime of not smoking. Discipline could be murderous. It became necessary to enforce startling legal limits: ‘when a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occasion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter; and if he makes use of an instrument improper for correction, as an iron bar or sword … he is guilty of murder.’

‘Taking life advice from John Donne would be disastrous

The author of this biography, Katherine Rundell, also contains multitudes. 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. Super-Infinite is a delight — quirky, learned, anecdotal, fun, and insightful. In Partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields. This series of nine lectures is inspired by the words of Martin Luther during the Reformation. Distinguished speakers investigate those things in which we believe deeply – and for which we would be prepared to make a costly stand. 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.)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. The poem could be seen as one of domineering masculinity, except that at the end of it there’s a joke: only the man stands naked. ‘To teach thee, I am naked first; why then/ What need’st thou have more cov’ring than a man?’ 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! Both Oxford and Cambridge were, at the time, just edging into fashionability: until shortly before Donne arrived, both places had been looked at with sceptical eyes by anyone with claim to any class. In 1549, Oxford students were ‘mean men’s children set to school in hope to live upon hired learning’. It was only as the century wore on that more gentry started to pass through the doors – by the time Donne came to live there, it had started to have a little cachet. There were various attempts to give it more of a gleam: when the antiquary William Camden published the Life of King Alfred by the medieval monk Asser, he added notes of his own, putting into the mouth of the monastic the fake claim that the University of Oxford had been founded by Alfred the Great. And the city would have been very beautiful in 1584, yellow-stoned and with the River Isis nearby. Its spires soared less ecstatically skywards than today, as most of the colleges were not yet fully formed, and the great Bodleian Library did not open until 1602, but it was still a place worth loving. A wonderful, joyous piece of work . . . with fierce, interrogative intelligence. It is fantastic to have this most elusive and mysterious of men brought out into the light, for all to see.”