Super-Infinite
by Katherine Rundell
Summary
A biography of the seventeenth-century poet and preacher John Donne that aims to recover the full, contradictory range of his existence — the adventurer and sea-farer, the secret lover, the ambitious courtier, the grief-stricken widower, and the commanding Dean of St Paul's — and to show how those lives fed each other and fed his poetry. Rundell writes with wit and urgency, making close arguments about individual poems while keeping Donne's chaotic biography moving at pace, and insisting that his verse speaks directly to experiences of love, doubt, and mortality that remain entirely contemporary. The book introduced Donne to a wide new readership and made a persuasive case for his place among the indispensable poets in English.
Historical Context & Significance
Rundell, a children's author, wrote this to make 17th-century poetry feel modern and urgent.