Born in 1572 into a Catholic family of Welsh origin connected with the martyred hero Thomas More, he grew up in the intense and secretive world of a religious minority subject to draconian restrictions and savage official penalties for non-compliance. And the subject matter was of intense concern: most hearers believed that what Donne was talking about had something to do with their ultimate nature and fate as human agents, and the detail of this was the topic of fierce public contest, literally a question of life and death.ĭonne knew more than many about this life-and-death dimension.

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.

She avoids (thankfully) the cliché about the early modern preacher as a rockstar equivalent, but helps us see that someone like Donne combined the appeal of a great actor, a performance poet, and a charismatic media don – a mixture of Mark Rylance, Kae Tempest and Brian Cox. As Katherine Rundell reminds us in this spirited and sympathetic biography, the risk was real enough when John Donne was in the pulpit, especially in the flower of his achievement as dean of St Paul’s.

He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.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. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father's consent struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - 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. Title: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donneįrom standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.

John donne infinite