The title of Katherine Rundell’s biography of the Renaissance poet and divine, John Donne, comes from his sermons, which few people read today. In a funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert (the mother of George Herbert), Donne writes that at the second coming of Christ, she would “dwell bodily … in these new heavens and new earth, for ever and ever and ever, and infinite and super-infinite forevers.” The prefix is superfluous, but it shows us a Donne, Rundell writes, who is “excessive, hungry,” full of “longing” for something “larger than infinity.”
Super-Infinite is about this hunger throughout Donne’s life. It is common to think of there being two Donnes. There is the swaggering and womanizing Jack Donne, a precocious and ambitious young man, popular with everyone he met, who wanted to make his mark on the world. This is the Donne who writes lines such as:
“Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o’erlick
Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take,
We err, and of a lump a monster make.”
Then there is the older Dr. Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, who, after an elopement with the daughter of a member of the House of Commons, found his worldly ambitions thwarted, eventually turned to the Church of England, preached tirelessly until his death, and wrote holy sonnets that begin with lines such as “Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest, / My soul, this wholesome meditation.”
Donne himself made the distinction between “Jack” and “Dr. Donne” in a letter to a friend, but Rundell argues that there are more than two Donnes and that they all share an intensity for life and a drive to transform it with words. This is, for Rundell, the defining trait of the man. Super-Infinite is not just a biography. It is also, as Rundell puts it, “an act of evangelism.” Donne’s poetry is “transformative,” she argues — it pushes language to its limits to “infuse every inch of the body” with the mind — and her hope with Super-Infinite is to give readers a taste of its transformative power.
Born a Catholic (his mother was the great-niece of the Catholic martyr Thomas More), Donne entered Oxford at 12. Despite the impression he gives in his earlier poems, Donne was a disciplined student, both at Oxford and, later, at Lincoln’s Inn, where he studied law. His hope was to make it at court. He became the Master of Revels at Lincoln’s Inn, throwing “wild parties for his fellow scholars,” Rundell writes, “with raucous singing and drinking and dancing of the galliard.” The poems of this period are already accomplished, showcasing his immense talent and cutting wit. He sounded, Rundell writes, “like nobody else,” and seemed destined for greatness.
In 1596 (Donne was 24), he went to sea with the Earl of Essex, who was a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth at the time, and was involved in the battle of Cadiz. He went to sea a second time, this time with Sir Walter Raleigh, before becoming a secretary for Thomas Egerton, who was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and one of the most powerful men in the country. “Donne saw in Egerton,” Rundell writes, “a glittering chance; for London life, for connection, for purpose, for promotion in the world.”
So he was. Donne became an MP in 1601 but rashly decided to marry Anne More, whom he had met in the Egerton household, without her father’s permission. The results were disastrous. Donne was briefly imprisoned, and Anne’s father, Sir George Moore, refused to acknowledge the marriage. Moore eventually relented but initially provided the young couple very little support. What followed were a dozen years of professional limbo, with Anne giving birth to a child nearly every year, five of whom died before the age of 10. It was during this time that Donne wrote, but did not publish, his famous defense of suicide.
Rundell says very little about Donne’s relationship to Anne or his children in part because Donne himself says very little. What she does say is judicious and is careful to avoid judging Donne by the standards of our own time. He “wasn’t a father who seemed to garner much joy from his children,” she writes, but adds that “Renaissance filial relations among the upper classes were carefully choreographed affairs: all lifted hats and hinging knees.” There is evidence that Donne felt “housebound.” He would travel to London whenever he could, describing life at home as akin to swimming in “stagnant water.” Though these trips were also made out of necessity: Donne needed to network to find employment.
In discussing Donne’s poems for influential patrons and patronesses, through which Donne hoped to gain some advantage, Rundell sees more than just flattery in them. When Donne writes of a patron’s daughter, who died at the age of 15, that the world could “have better spared the Sun or the Moon,” lines that Ben Jonson mocked as being over-the-top, Rundell remarks that poem, for Donne, was not “so much about the girl as it was about language: about what poetry can do in the art of praising.” She writes that his letters and his poems from this period of his life show his “canny, cautious, political side,” but they also show something else: “pleasure in extravagance.” “There must have been real satisfaction for him,” Rundell writes, “in lavishing compliments … he could not host fine dinners, but he could send fine idioms.”
Drawing from recent scholarship, Rundell argues convincingly that Donne’s turn toward Anglicanism was no mere “expediency.” He had been thinking about Anglicanism for years, and he had to fight to enter the priesthood, Rundell shows, which suggests that he was not just motivated by a paycheck.
Rundell’s handling of Donne’s later years is as balanced and engaging as her handling of his early years. She notes that while he became more authoritarian (Donne always had “a streak of fury in him,” Rundell writes), we still see the same man, a man searching for (and at times finding) a feeling of rapture in life and in God. Donne coined some 300 words. In writing about Donne’s disapproval of Galileo’s discoveries, Rundell observes that it is “part of the riddle of Donne’s personality that he was at once wary of innovation and one of the greatest innovators in the English language.”
If you’ve read either David Edward’s John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit (2001) or John Stubb’s John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006), there are few details in Super-Infinite you won’t already know. But if you want to experience Donne anew, or if you have never experienced him before, pick up a copy of Super-Infinite. It’s the best book on Donne in years.
Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
