![]() ![]() ![]() She said she hoped the book, which took a decade to write, would give readers a set of tools to unpick him, because when you do crack a Donne poem it is like cracking a safe. He was able to hold love and dread in the same hand. 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. We are essentially sort of a disaster, but the most miraculous disaster that there has ever been. He was a man who suffered from surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love. ![]() ![]() 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. It is bold, streetwise and outspoken, and is right in the world, with references to modern culture and politics, as well as modern language, peppered throughout. 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. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |