katherine rundell super infinite the transformations of john donne

He eventually became a prominent clergyman in Elizabeth’s Church of England, his sermons drawing rock concert crowds as he found words for the indescribable, the “infinite and super-infinite forevers.” Whether in poetry, sermons or prose, he minted astonishing formulations, written not to explain but to capture the chaos he sensed around him, “a world that was shifting and raw and unhinged. Donne’s family were persecuted for being Roman Catholic by Elizabeth’s Protestant regime, his beloved brother drawn and quartered (i.e. His was a hard yet successful life with many strange turns. “His mind had ceaselessness built into it … a writer who had erupted through the old into the new.”

“Donne’s mind was cacophonous,” she proposes. He sounds like a chapter from an English lit textbook, but in the hands of Katherine Rundell, Donne comes vividly to life in multiple dimensions and Technicolor prose.Ī fellow at All Souls, Oxford, Rundell follows the paper trail to plausible conclusions and writes with lively, surprising turns of phrase in nearly every paragraph. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed 'act of evangelism', showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times - unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.John Donne is listed with England’s great poets of the Elizabethan age, a contemporary of Shakespeare (they probably never met). Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, Donne was incapable of being just one thing. *From a standout scholar, a biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.

He was a man who suffered from black surges of sadness, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love.

He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.

Katherine rundell super infinite the transformations of john donne