'Super-Infinite' by Katherine Rundell
John Donne is listed with England’s great poets of the Elizabethan age, a contemporary of Shakespeare (they probably never met). 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.
A 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. “Donne’s mind was cacophonous,” she proposes. “His mind had ceaselessness built into it … a writer who had erupted through the old into the new.”
His was a hard yet successful life with many strange turns. Donne’s family were persecuted for being Roman Catholic by Elizabeth’s Protestant regime, his beloved brother drawn and quartered (i.e. tortured and executed). 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.”
