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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.’ 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.
Super-infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones
Anne was born too late for the burst of enthusiasm for female learning that erupted between 1523 and 1538 inspired by Catherine of Aragon. It was the world of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and a flourishing of knowledge, both mystical, and scientific. I know very little about the poet John Donne. Iread his poem ‘The Flea’ at school and his name is very familiar but that's about it. 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.This body of surviving work is enough, taken together, to make the case that Donne was one of the finest writers in English: that he belongs up alongside Shakespeare, and that to let him slowly fall out of the common consciousness would be as foolish as discarding a kidney or a lung. The work cuts through time to us: but his life also cannot be ignored – because the imagination that burns through his poetry was the same which attempted to manoeuvre through the snake pit of the Renaissance court. This book, then, hopes to do both: both to tell the story of his life, and to point to the places in his work where his words are at their most singular: where his words can be, for a modern reader, galvanic. His work still has the power to be transformative. This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism.
Super Infinite review: A masterful biography of John Donne Super Infinite review: A masterful biography of John Donne
This short biography of John Donne is a really good read! Katherine Rundell's obvious enthusiasm for her subject really shines through and her retelling of the life of the great man is fast paced, analytical and- at times- even irreverent; something which seems to sit perfectly with Donne's personality, particularly as a young man. Self-bifurcating molars and state-endorsed torture: these were the things of Donne’s early years. It was a darkly particular way to grow up; not only the terror and injustice, but the strangeness of it: how unhinged the world must feel, that you are persecuted for professing that which you believe to be the most powerful possible truth. Not ‘strange’ as in ‘unfamiliar’, for being killed for your religion was hardly new; strange as in unmoored from all sense, reason, sanity. 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’. Rundell, at one point, says: “The human soul is so ruthlessly original; the only way to express the distinctive pitch of one’s own heart is for each of us to build our own way of using our voice. To read Donne is to be told: kill the desire to keep the accent and tone of the time. It is necessary to shake language until it will express our own distinctive hesitations, peculiarities, our own uncertain and never-quite-successful yearning towards beauty.” Amen to that.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.” This is my first time reading a book about Donne since finishing my Senior thesis. It is strange diving again into familiar waters, fragments of poems, whole poems, still memorized and still deeply loved, reemerge. But a haze seems to have gone over them this past decade. Clearing it is arresting and unsettling. Katherine Rundell's critical biography of John Donne is highly readable, deftly handling the complexity of Donne's writing without getting lost in that elegant tangle of words. She clearly admires Donne's idiosyncratic approach to his life and to his writing, and her enthusiasm for her subject really does infect the reader.
Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell review - The Guardian
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. 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.” I'll finish my review with a quote that an anonymous poet wrote across the wall over Donne's grave in charcoal: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.” The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured for himself celebrity, for- tune and a captive audience. He had been appointed the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral two years before: he was fifty-one, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation – merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city – came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. He often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him. His words, they said, could ‘charm the soul’.
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