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Published Sep 2022
352 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.
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. 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. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
"[A] fresh, delightful biography of John Donne (1572-1631)...Written with verve and panache, this sparkling biography is enjoyable from start to finish." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] thoughtful biography...Rundell's prose is stylish and playful, referring, for instance, to Donne's religious treatise Pseudo-Martyr as 'so dense it would be swifter to eat it than to read it.' This comprehensive study is poetic in its own right; scholars, students, and poetry lovers, take note." - Publishers Weekly
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Photo: Blair Mowat
Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, and The Good Thieves. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. In her spare time, she enjoys walking on tightropes and trespassing on the rooftops of Oxford colleges.
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