super infinite the transformations of john donne reviews

Donne moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Donne was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution family members were imprisoned and tortured.

In addition to Carey’s study, there’s a recent comprehensive biography by John Stubbs. The facts of Donne’s life are well known. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. (Sept.Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. (“The word most used across his poetry, apart from ‘and’ and ‘the’,” Rundell notes, “is ‘love.’ ”) Rundell’s prose is stylish and playful, referring, for instance, to Donne’s religious treatise Pseudo-Martyr as “so dense it would be swifter to eat it than to read it.” This comprehensive study is poetic in its own right scholars, students, and poetry lovers, take note. Donne was keenly aware of sorrow, Rundell shows, and believed “we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.” But he was also a biting satirist who mocked social expectations through his writing, and a romantic. Donne “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,” Rundell writes as she traces Donne’s life from his birth into a Catholic family during the strife of the Protestant Reformation through his formal education, appointment as a member of Parliament, marriage to Anne More (which got him thrown into Fleet Prison More was a minor and her family didn’t approve the marriage), and his eventual renunciation of Catholicism for Anglican priesthood.

Scholar Rundell ( The Wolf Wilder) explores in this thoughtful biography the life and art of poet and priest John Donne (1572–1631), positioning him as an imaginative, witty, and sensual figure.

Super infinite the transformations of john donne reviews