Katherine Rundell’s biography explores the life of the great writer and Anglican cleric, John Donne. He wrote the well-known sonnet, “Death, be not proud,” which featured in the Pulitzer Award-winning drama Wit by Margaret Edson. Along with writers like Marlowe, Donne made skillful use of the metaphysical conceit: strikingly dissimilar extended metaphors.
The book’s chapters are stylishly divided into different aspects of this brilliant literary figure: brother, scholar, husband, father of ten, and clergyman, among others.
Interweaving England’s past—political, economic, religious, and cultural—with Donne’s personal and familial background, Super-Infinite reveals his perspective on the heightened tensions of the nation. The son of Elizabeth Haywood, great-niece of the Catholic martyr St Thomas More, Donne learned and witnessed the often performative intersections between dogged faith, persecution, and death.
He later became a Protestant, either for personal conviction or practical purposes of that time. The violence arising from politico-religious decisions in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Mary I and Elizabeth I (and it did not stop there), compelled Donne to reflect on and write about death. He devoted the majority of his Songs and Sonnets to the subject.
Rundell’s writing is keen, accessible and electric, jolting you awake by shedding light on this great man who lived multiple lives in one. She offers an excellent, sympathetic, and energising representation of Donne’s life, works, and worlds. The book contains various detailed illustrations—paintings, portraits, woodcuts, and etchings—and analyses excerpts of his poems.
The entire biography bares his burdens: chronic illness, pain, weakness, and financial struggle. From life’s hardships and relationships, he gleaned timeless themes and illuminated them: love, intimacy, human error, endurance, death, and resurrection. Such notions, bridging body and soul, have always swayed humankind. For these reasons, Super-Infinite demonstrates that Donne lives on.
Reviewer: Azariah Alfante
Allen & Unwin