Super-infinite: the transformations of john donne - katherine rundell

Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Longlisted for the 2023 Plutarch Award A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of 2022 A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker , Times Literary Supplement , and Literary Hub From the 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.

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 fathers 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 Donnes 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.