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It’s unclear from the Privy Council records exactly what happened to Thomas – but tradition holds that he was executed as his family looked on. This book aims to lay out that note as clearly as possible: how John Donne saw us with such clarity, and how he set down what he knew with such precision and flair that we can seize hold of it, and carry it with us.
Super-Infinite — the life and rhymes of John Donne Super-Infinite — the life and rhymes of John Donne
Nearly three centuries before, another poet, John Donne, was communicating a similar truth about himself through his poems, essays, and sermons. The Diocese of Gloucester is looking for two creative, flexible and holistic thinkers who care passionately about nurturing leaders who will share the good news of Jesus Christ and make disciples in all our varied contexts. In a world like this, you can take enormous risks in playing with concepts and images, because of a confidence that things will join up sooner or later; you can launch out from a trapeze, knowing that someone or something else’s trajectory will bring them to a place where they can catch you. Donne seems to deserve the questionable recognition of being the first to so use ‘purse’ for female genitalia. Rundell debunks the traditional, self-perpetuated image of the young Donne as a lothario, observing that “women of his class would have been hard to seduce … make a mistake … and you could be punished for life”.A few years before his own death, Donne preached a funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert, mother of the poet George Herbert, a woman who had been his patron and friend. Rundell subsequently completed a doctoral thesis, titled "'And I am re-begot': the textual afterlives of John Donne". Given his fascinating life, it’s surprising that Donne hasn’t been written about more over the past decades. Standout scholar, Katherine Rundell shows us the many sides of his life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times – unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living. Much later, he wrote that in the past he had seen executions of Catholic priests, and around their bodies ‘some bystanders, leaving all old Saints, pray to him whose body lay there dead; as if he had more respect, and better access in heaven.
Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell; and A Companion in Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell; and A Companion in
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. Donne was once taken right into the heart of the fear, inside the Tower of London to visit his uncle Jasper. In her 5 star review in The Telegraph Nicola Shulman heralds Rundell’s biography as ‘blazingly intelligent and witty. The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes. Whole libraries’ worth of paper: accounts, disputes, wills, play texts and poems, postmasters’ trunks, bills, love letters folded so intricately into paper locks that you couldn’t open them without leaving a telltale tear; all gone.But Donne’s internal baggage was piled high with skulls: with persecuted family members, with the wounds of his mother and uncles. She sees Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne as a work of advocacy born of great passion, having had a long-term fascination with the poet since she wrote her PhD thesis on him. Donne’s family history was one of blood and fire; a great-uncle was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed: another was locked inside the Tower of London, where as a small schoolboy Donne visited him, venturing fearfully in among the men convicted to death. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealised, sanitised desire: he joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul. 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’.
Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell | Book review | The TLS Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell | Book review | The TLS
It is a place in which connections are everywhere, in which the material stuff of the world is always “speaking” and pointing and cross-referencing. He knew of transformation into misery: ‘But O, self traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstantiates all/And can convert manna to gall’ – but also the trans- formation achieved by beautiful women: ‘Us she informed, but transubstantiates you’. Once, Weston disguised himself in other clothes and came with Elizabeth into the Tower, an act of astonishing bravery or stupidity or both, to go into arms’ reach of the jailers. He was almost in sight of Dieppe when a storm blew his boat, drenched and battered, all the way back to England.As this new biography comments, his restless hungers and desires made Donne “incapable of being just one thing. He was racked, over and over again, by life-threatening illnesses, with dozens of bouts of fever, aching throat, vomiting; at least three times it was believed he was dying. Rundell argues that Donne “understood that flair is its own kind of truth: if you want to make your point, make it so vivid and strange that it cuts straight through your interlocutor’s complacent inattention”. Yancey came across these 23 meditations — written in 1623, during a bubonic plague epidemic in London — as he tried to think his way through Covid-19. Five of his children were either stillborn or died before they were 10, and he even had a prophetic vision of one of them dying while he was away on a trip to Paris in 1612.
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