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Rundell's play Life According to Saki, with David Paisley in the title role, [19] won the 2016 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award [20] and opened Off-Broadway in February 2017. [14] If the early love poems play with all the dimensions of delight and surprise that can surround physical love, the devotional poetry and prose linger on the equally diverse and complex realities of human mortality. “Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” as Rundell splendidly puts it, and he did so in the face of his own death, using protracted illness as an occasion for intense and intricately composed meditations, and quite literally posing for a portrait in his shroud. He took his galvanising imagination and brought it to bear on everything he wrote: his sermons, his meditations, his religious verse. In the twenty-first century, Donne’s imagination offers us a form of body armour. His work is protection against the slipshod and the half-baked, against anti-intellectualism, against those who try to sell you their money-ridden vision of sex and love. He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought. It’s not that he was a rebel: it is that he was a pure original. They do us a service, the true uncompromising originals: they show us what is possible. This body of surviving work is enough, taken together, to make the case that Donne was one of the finest writers in English: that he belongs up alongside Shakespeare, and that to let him slowly fall out of the common consciousness would be as foolish as discarding a kidney or a lung. The work cuts through time to us: but his life also cannot be ignored – because the imagination that burns through his poetry was the same which attempted to manoeuvre through the snake pit of the Renaissance court. This book, then, hopes to do both: both to tell the story of his life, and to point to the places in his work where his words are at their most singular: where his words can be, for a modern reader, galvanic. His work still has the power to be transformative. This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism. Mortality was not a quiet cessation but an entry into an unimaginably enhanced and concentrated sensuality, the “one equal music” he evokes in a much-quoted sermon. One of the real strengths of this book is that we are encouraged to see the continuity of Donne’s imagination – and not just in its blazing metaphorical fertility but in its awareness of how readily it can be distracted by the momentary and trivial.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Goodreads
Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’ That version of Donne – excessive, hungry, longing – is everywhere in the love poetry. Sometimes it was worn lightly: who has yet written about nudity with more glee, more jokes? In ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’, written in his twenties, the speaker attempts to coax his lover out of her clothes: If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. In Rundell, Donne has an authoritative and sympathetic chronicler. If Super-infinite is ultimately stronger on the thematic and literary than the historical – Rundell’s evocations of court and international intrigue are gripping, but veer away from the book’s protagonist – then its achievements are substantial enough to make any shortcomings seem petty. This fine book demands and rewards your fullest concentration, just as its subject does: a super-infinite amount, in fact.More uncomfortably, what do we make of Donne’s “male gaze”? The erotic poetry is wonderfully inventive, witty and joyful; is it also a poetry that leaves the female partner silent and (we hope at least) compliant? Even when Donne uses erotic imagery in his devotional work, there are uncomfortable notes of violence – as in the famous “Batter my heart…” sonnet with its stark concluding image of divine rape. Eternity, in its particular manifestation as infinity, is Rundell’s central theme. This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an “infinity merchant”. In embracing infinity, he turned eternity into a mathematical concept, and there is pulsing excitement to his quest for this quality, which runs through his writing about sex, death and God – his three great subjects. To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness. Each this and that’: his work suggests that we might voyage beyond the blunt realities of male and female. In ‘The Undertaking’, probably written around the time he met Anne, the body can take you to a grand merging: For all their length, his sermons were never sombre or staid: they were passionate performances, attempts to strike a match against the rough walls of the listeners’ chest cavities. It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. 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. This is a love story, yet few of Donne’s love poems were written for Anne, and Rundell is good, too, on Donne as the swaggering womaniser who in reality had very little sex. 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.
Super-infinite | Katherine Rundell | Granta Super-infinite | Katherine Rundell | Granta
a b Allardice, Lisa (18 November 2022). "Interview: 'Taking life advice from John Donne would be disastrous' – the roof-walking, trapeze-flying Baillie Gifford winner". The Guardian. 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. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.”
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops. This article was originally published in May 2022.
Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell; and A Companion in Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell; and A Companion in
The author of this biography, Katherine Rundell, also contains multitudes. A bestselling author of children’s books, a Fellow of All Souls, a night climber, and a tightrope walker, she is just the person to get to grips with the childlike curiosity, the mature intellectual dexterity, the plunges into soul darkness, and the balancing act of passionate worldly desire and a deep longing for God, which Donne’s life holds together all in one. Super-Infinite is a delight — quirky, learned, anecdotal, fun, and insightful. The Bald John Donne: A Life from the 1970s remains the standard scholarly biography: dusty? yes; dry? yes; but all the detail we need for studying Donne is here and meticulously referenced. Carey's John Donne, Life, Mind, and Art is typical of Carey: opinionated, uneven, wild speculation with no evidence, but provocative and stimulating; the more recent Stubb ( John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography) is a modern take using frameworks of ambition and power to assess Donne's life but, despite that title, doesn't engage with the fact that for Donne (and his peers) religion was bound up with faith, something we might struggle with in our secular society. And Stubb doesn't engage with the poetry. And now Rundell where, I'd say, her own lively vision obscures Donne. a b c d de Lisle, Tim (22 January 2017). "British Novelist Bringing Edwardian Wit Off-Broadway". Newsweek. New York City . Retrieved 23 January 2017. Prix Sorcières - Lauréats 2015: Romans Juniors - Lauréat". www.abf.asso.fr. Association des Bibliothécaires de France. 4 April 2016 . Retrieved 22 April 2017.
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Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018 winners". Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. 1 February 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018 . Retrieved 11 August 2018. Donne seems to deserve the questionable recognition of being the first to so use ‘purse’ for female genitalia. The ‘exchequer’ implies that those who travel down the body must pay a tax: and ejaculate is the fitting tribute. (Men were believed to need a huge amount of blood to form sperm within the body: a ratio of 40:1.) A ‘clyster’ is an enema tube which was used to carry nutrients to the body via the rectum. The argument – that those who don’t consummate love are as mad and upside-down as those who try to nourish the body via the anus – has teeming desire in it, but very much resists the tradition of Petrarchan flowers. It refuses to be pretty, because sex is not and because Donne does not, in his love poetry, insist on sweetness: he does not play the ‘my lady is a perfect dove’ game beloved by those who came before him. What good is perfection to humans? It’s a dead thing. The urgent, the bold, the witty, the sharp: all better than perfection. But there was also tragedy. When she was 10, her foster sister died. Throughout her illness, books became Rundell’s refuge but they also gave her the motivation to become a writer. “I think her loss offered me a sense that life is precious and difficult. But it is very beautiful and very, very painful to be alive. I think most people realise that – I perhaps learned it younger than some.” And it is this message, for want of a better word, that she wanted to convey in her own books for children. As one of the explorers in her novel says: “You are right to be afraid. Be brave anyway.” Her hobby is roof-walking. Google her and you will see her elegantly poised on the crenellated roof of All Souls college Rooftoppers. Illustrated by Terry Fan. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. 24 September 2013. ISBN 978-1442490581. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: others ( link) Katherine Rundell has a wonderful touch, light yet profound, which perfectly suits her extraordinary subject. The book combines delight in Donne’s humanity and his intellect, even as it delves into his metaphysics. Unmissable.”
Super-infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones
As reported by The Guardian, "She is giving the Baillie Gifford prize money to charity: to Blue Ventures, an ocean-based conservation organisation, and also to a refugee charity. The reason? 'No man is an island,' she says, citing that most famous of all Donne lines." [11] Personal life [ edit ] To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar. To modern ears, they are winding, elongated, perambulating things; a pleasure that is also work. An engraving of John Donne: ‘preoccupied with potential damnation and more earthly concerns’. Photograph: PHAS/UIG/Getty Images Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.” Ben Jonson’s stern judgment on his contemporary, the metaphysical poet, cleric and scholar John Donne, was mitigated by his concession that he was “the first poet in the world for some things”. Nearly four centuries after his death, Donne remains a man of his age and a thoroughly contemporary figure, whose love of ambiguity and paradox, in life and art alike, baffles and thrills. I couldn’t say what prompted me to read a biography of John Donne — in my mind he was frozen as the stern elder preacher who would chillingly warn down the length of a gnarled and bony finger it tolls for thee — so I am delighted to have so enjoyed Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite, reminding me that even those dusty old poets, forever frozen in woodcut portraits on foxed anthologies’ frontispieces, were once young and striving and pulsing with life. As Rundell reports, there is only the sketchiest of biographical information available on Donne, but with an exuberant and colourful writing style, she brings his world alive and makes the case that not only was Donne one of the greatest innovators of the English language in his day, but that he arguably remains the greatest writer of desire in English of all time. With such big claims satisfyingly supported, I was entertained and educated throughout; delighted after all to have taken this plunge on Donne. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)IT WAS the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman who unapologetically announced: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Nearly three centuries before, another poet, John Donne, was communicating a similar truth about himself through his poems, essays, and sermons. From his earlier days, when excited by the nakedness of his body, till later in life, when he feared the nakedness of his soul, Donne’s life was as inspirited by love, language, sex, and God as much as it was complicated by ambition, illness, money problems, and the death of six of his children.
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