Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Katherine Rundell

Category: Adults, Autobiography & Biographies, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: 1600's England Free-spirit poet Sociology

Written by Katherine Rundell
Read by Simon Vance
Format: MP3

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: September 6, 2022
Duration: 07:07:15

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.

“Portraying the life of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, narrator Simon Vance is, as always, eloquent, precise, and finely attuned. He delivers some of the finest lines in British poetry with ease and assurance. Donne’s poetic genius emerged out of long struggle and deprivation, shadowed by a love-match elopement that ruined his prospects but inspired much of his greatest verse. The emotional center of this accessible and insightful narrative is the death of Anne Donne at 33, after bearing her 12th child, a scene that Vance renders with powerful feeling and restraint. This fine production of one of this year’s best literary biographies will lead listeners inevitably to the riches of Donne’s poetry, memorably recorded by actor Richard Burton, among others.”–Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award