Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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Donne was once taken right into the heart of the fear, inside the Tower of London to visit his uncle Jasper.

‘Taking life advice from John Donne would be disastrous

Not just Catholic, then, but super-Catholic: the kind of Catholic which relishes the theatre and paraphernalia of martyrdom. Rundell] nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived .Donne loved the trans-prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing – ‘transpose’, ‘translate’, ‘transport’, ‘transubstantiate’. Not ‘strange’ as in ‘unfamiliar’, for being killed for your religion was hardly new; strange as in unmoored from all sense, reason, sanity. In 1549, Oxford students were ‘mean men’s children set to school in hope to live upon hired learning’. Finally a biography of John Donne that captures his eccentricities, his contradictions, his fabulous twists and turns, his trickiness . She has spent ten years studying his works and life and writing this book and is adamant that ‘you cannot get bored of him […] because he has in him the capacity to infinitely renew himself’.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Goodreads

In 1584 he enrolled with his younger brother Henry at Hart Hall, Oxford University; their ages were given as eleven and ten respectively, although in fact they were both a year older. Donne, aged twelve or thereabouts, accompanied them, perhaps as a way of making the party seem innocent and familial; he wrote, later, that he was once at ‘a Consultation of Jesuits in the Tower, in the late Queen’s time’. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before, dwelling on the daring of Anne’s acceptance of this man at a time when upper-class young women obeyed their fathers and, crucially, demonstrated their virtue by being unwooable. His religious faith might have been, at times, quixotic, but it was sincere and a source of comfort to him, his congregation and his readers.

Catholics in the late 16th and early 17th centuries were thought of in a similar way as we might think of Islamic State or al-Qaeda: for English Protestants, the Catholic martyr was not far removed from the suicide bomber in the modern imagination, someone who was as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous.

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The last thing that keeps contemporary Anglican preachers awake at night is the risk of serious injury resulting from the crush of people in their congregations. He was a man who suffered from black surges of sadness, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love. Throughout his life, beset as he was by illness and money worries, Donne retained an unremitting self-belief, justified by intellectual genius and personal charm. Although his work can be difficult, it speaks seductively to our anxiety-riddled times: to read his poetry is to be reassured and challenged simultaneously.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. All students over sixteen were required to take an oath acknowledging royal supremacy over all questions of religion: but it was thought that a child under sixteen couldn’t be expected to understand the nature of the oath, and therefore the young brothers could live under the radar in Hart Hall, a place with a reputation for nurturing and protecting Catholics.

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There are satires, religious verse, and about forty verse letters, a tradition he loved; poems of anything from twelve to 130 lines, carrying news, musings on virtue and God, and declarations of how richly he treasures the friend to whom he is writing. People came to experience the sheer stage presence; but they also relished the physical energy of the words, the music of rhythms and cadences constructed by an expert rhetorician. BeiHis grandfather became famous for his deathbed comedy: his confessor, repeating over and over that ‘the flesh is frail’, to which Heywood: ‘Marry, Father … it will go hard but you shall prove that God should a made me a fish. She is convincing in her suggestion that Donne wrote his most satisfying erotic poems not for his lovers but for an audience of male friends.