From a standout scholar, a 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.
He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of Parliament--and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. 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 surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed act of evangelism, showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times--unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.
Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket
Pages: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0374607400
Item Weight: 1.0 lbs
Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 1,001 to 10,000 ratings
"Katherine Rundell makes John Donne come alive as a remarkable and extraordinary and almost boundless human being. His life was one of despair and joy, the sacred and the profane, deep love and pain, and this book is filled with such infectious passion and fascinating detail that it shines like its subject. A triumph." --Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library
"What a delightful book Super-Infinite is: companionable, astute, intimate in tone, and clear-eyed in judgment, it brings John Donne and his milieu to glorious life. I loved it." --Nick Laird, author of Feel Free
Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. Rundell is also the author of a book for adults, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. She has written for, among others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times, largely about books, though sometimes about animals, night climbing, and tightrope walking.
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