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She avoids (thankfully) the cliché about the early modern preacher as a rockstar equivalent, but helps us see that someone like Donne combined the appeal of a great actor, a performance poet, and a charismatic media don – a mixture of Mark Rylance, Kae Tempest and Brian Cox. His poetry is wildly delighted and captivated by the body – though broken, though doomed to decay – and by the ways in which thinking fast and hard were a sensual joy akin to sex.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of
Published after Super-Infinity, this collection of short essays celebrates endangered creatures from crows to pangolins. Not just Catholic, then, but super-Catholic: the kind of Catholic which relishes the theatre and paraphernalia of martyrdom.He had been made a Fellow of All Souls College, home of the incurably bookish, where he produced three translations of plays by Seneca. The challenge for any biographer is to delve into the apparent contradictions between the two Donnes, the piratical Jack who sailed with Raleigh to Cadiz and who wrote brilliant sonnets, rich in witty paradox and bold sexual assertion, and the prelate Dr John, who eventually became dean of St Paul’s; an accomplishment, Rundell tells us, that owed as much to his networking skills as it did to his considerable ability at preaching. He married a young woman, Anne More, clandestine and hurried by love, and as a result found himself thrown in prison, spending dismayed ice-cold winter months first in a disease-ridden cell and then under house arrest.
Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell review - The Guardian
There are no manuscript drafts of poems – we have only one English poem in his own handwriting – and so no evidence of him at work, building the verse from false starts and scratches.The idea of writing letters in verse wasn’t his own – Petrarch did it, and the tradition dates all the way back to Ovid, whose Heroides are imagined verse letters by the wronged heroines of Roman and Greek myths – but Donne seems to have used the form more than any other poet of his lifetime. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs had been published in 1563, nine years before Donne’s birth, and its frontispiece illustration served well to remind those in doubt of where the country stood: on one side Catholics with bulbous noses are seized by gleeful demons, while on the other Protestants with aquiline profiles burn in the fires of persecution and rise to glory. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.
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