Rundell shares some of her subject’s daring, which likely contributes to the freshness of her take on Donne ... She is especially good on Donne’s efforts to express ideas in novel ways ... Rundell’s own style can dazzle, though at times the wit feels a bit strained ... Rundell is keenly aware of the misogyny of a good number of these poems, and defends Donne without excusing him, pointing out that it’s a mistake to conflate the poet with the poem’s speaker ... Far more than previous (and male) biographers, Rundell is alert to Anne’s travails ... Those who write about Donne tend to gravitate either to the libertine poet and secretly Catholic Jack Donne or to the sober Protestant preacher, Dr. Donne ... One of the great achievements of this impressive biography — which rises to the challenge of introducing Donne and his world to the next generation of readers — is that it shows how these two Donnes were always one and the same.
Erudite, entertaining ... Super-Infinite is an attempt to crack Donne’s code ... Super-Infinite hardly reads like an academic work. Ms. Rundell does not attempt a feminist defense of Donne’s love poetry...she adores much of it despite any reservations. There is little analysis of his artistic influences, and less of his posthumous reputation. Instead she ransacks his poetry and prose for insight into the man himself ... As a meditation on 'love, sex and death'” as the book’s jacket copy has it, and as a guide to how John Donne’s mind worked, Super-Infinite is a wonder. The account leaves a few questions, mostly concerning Donne’s religious development ... Ms. Rundell, like all literary biographers, cites many phrases from her subject’s writing, suggesting how they shed light on episodes from life. At times, this means transposing a passage composed during one period into a quite different chronological context. Can the words of the dashing young clerk or struggling scribbler really illuminate the thoughts of the grandee of St. Paul’s? Super-Infinite almost convinces you they can.
Spirited and sympathetic ... One of the real strengths of this book is that we are encouraged to see the continuity of Donne’s imagination – and not just in its blazing metaphorical fertility but in its awareness of how readily it can be distracted by the momentary and trivial ... Rundell manages to make Anne Donne a credible and lively presence in the story, with her own pathos ... Rndell rightly cautions against writing Donne off as a misogynist ... Katherine Rundell does in this book what any good literary biographer must do: share that sense of work to do, as well as the wonder and delight.
Rundell is right that Donne...must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called 'felt thought', his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract ... It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before ... Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on ... This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an 'infinity merchant' ... To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness
Katherine Rundell...is tempted to overexcitement ... Vigorous ... It is a forgivable tendency of evangelising critics to mistake the enthusiasm a poem inspires in them for a quality of the poetry itself ... It is a trap Rundell does not always dodge ... The greatest strength of Rundell’s book is the way she magics this world to life, making its intricacies and insanities comprehensible.
Vivid ... In celebrating Donne’s originality and arresting language, Rundell herself aims to follow his example. She salts her pages with startling analogies, the best of which suggest the flavor of his times ... Her novel approach to organizing the biography is more effective than her hit-or-miss metaphors. Refusing to follow convention and split the life into two phases and two
corresponding personae...or just as reductively divide the exuberant early love poetry from the later, but equally passionate religious writing, Rundell showcases his multiple identities in lively, short chapters that invite reading ... Each chapter focuses on a distinct transformation of Donne’s life, yet encompasses animating themes and habits of mind found everywhere in his writing.
... wonderful ... the biographer Donne has been waiting for. Her energy, intellect and arresting phrasemaking can keep up with her subject’s. Like him, Rundell loves the world and everything in it; like him, she notices everything; and like him, her interest is in cohesion and continuity.
... frankly brilliant ... At the heart of Rundell’s thrilling reassessment of Donne’s oddly hinged career is an argument for transformation rather than rupture ... Particularly brilliant is Rundell’s ability to enter Donne’s inner world through his verse without ever falling into the easy assumption that his poetry must be autobiographical ... The fact that this is Rundell’s first non-fiction book — she has previously written children’s novels that have scooped multiple awards — is something of a wonder. On reading this extraordinary biography you are left concluding that her talent, like that of her hero’s, must somehow be super-infinite.
... a trim, highly readable study ... accessible without compromising its seriousness of purpose ... I had many thoughts while reading Super-Infinite, but the most persistent one was this: there ought to be more books like it. It announces itself with none of the usual augustness of prestige nonfiction. You can’t use it to stop your door, there is no oil portrait on the cover, and the title says not a word about nations, wars, centuries, or the invention of anything modern. It is light-footed without being in the least light-witted ... Rundell does not claim that John Donne is more relevant today than ever before. She does not tease new discoveries. She assumes that literature is a matter of general concern, and that her own enthusiasm for Donne is worth communicating thoughtfully and with care. That enthusiasm is both intellectual and erotic ... This is the tone: winking, suggestive, sympathetic. Rundell is an excellent storyteller, moving ably between anecdote and analysis and never losing track of her purpose, which is to follow Donne from cradle to grave and convince us to come along. Throughout Super-Infinite, she strikes a fine balance between discussions of Donne’s writing and accounts of his world. The sectarian clashes of the Reformation are, to put it mildly, complex, the inter-imperial wars that doused them in gasoline and used them for tinder even more so. Rundell has the right feel for just how much detail an engaged but nonspecialist reader can take. Theological debates are summarized broadly but neatly, and flashy characters like Robert Devereux, George Villiers, King James I, and even Nicolaus Copernicus amble on and off stage without drawing the spotlight away from the man himself ... This mode works particularly well given that, as Rundell explains in her introduction, there is not that much material when it comes to Donne’s curriculum vitae ... There are plenty of insights into Donne’s poetry threaded through ... especially absorbing when it comes to Donne’s final years.
Donne turns his scholars into lovers, and as a result books about him tend surprisingly often to rise up to the sparkiness of their histrionic, funny and endlessly fascinating subject ... Katherine Rundell’s Super-infinite is a wonderfully Donnean book. It sits in a long pedigree of loving, scholarly responses to the poet, but captures with an unusual wit the variety and richness of its subject. It is neither a strict biography nor only a critical engagement with his poems, but offers instead half a riff on his life and half a love letter to him. There is a lot in the life, and Rundell gives us a quick march through ... Rundell is a fabulous storyteller ... The moments at which Rundell is a little conventional permit us to distinguish her own true invention: and through it, perhaps, Donne’s ... The book stages an often thrilling meeting between Donne and Rundell, and its basis is this supple, flexible wordplay in which sentences jump between registers and tones, between this world and the next, between everything and something more.
This isn’t some dry academic tome but a sharply animated and imaginative account of a remarkable figure ... Had Rundell wanted to, she could easily have moulded his story into a novel along the lines of Wolf Hall.
Masterly ... The challenge for any biographer is to delve into the apparent contradictions between the two Donnes ... Rundell has an engagingly idiosyncratic and playful style ... It suits her subject, who took delight in combining high learning with bawdy humour ... In Rundell, Donne has an authoritative and sympathetic chronicler. If Super-infinite is ultimately stronger on the thematic and literary than the historical – Rundell’s evocations of court and international intrigue are gripping, but veer away from the book’s protagonist – then its achievements are substantial enough to make any shortcomings seem petty. This fine book demands and rewards your fullest concentration, just as its subject does: a super-infinite amount, in fact.
Katherine Rundell...has taken up the task of connecting us to Donne’s extraordinary mind through his eventful biography, and leaves one wondering how it could ever have been left aside. It’s a tempestuous tale ... Yet readers may be divided by Rundell’s prose style ... The larkiness arguably becomes slightly strained ... Rundell also peppers her text with fun anecdotes about life in Donne’s time ... She believes in grabbing and gripping the reader’s attention ... Not all readers are inattentive, though, and while some will enjoy the efforts to sparkle and charm, others may find them a little relentless ... There are quieter moments to relish, however, such as when Rundell assesses the many possible reasons for Donne’s conversion to Protestantism ... Quotations from letters and prose works as well as the poems give us a vivid sense of his distinctive voice and his intellectual intensity, restlessness, and wit; while the book is by no means lacking in serious and thought-provoking ideas ... She urgently and admirably wants us to appreciate that he understood the extremities of human experience and the transformative powers of language like no one else before or since.
In this new critical biography, Katherine Rundell brings us a fresh take on the poems, prose, and protean identities of a 17th-century master of the English language ... Both humble and flashy ... Rundell is a playful, incandescent stylist who brings scintillating insight to her subject ... The author sets out to overturn the narrow angle on Donne that many of us have picked up like a subtle classroom virus ... Donne’s creative pilgrimage was less a stark shift from one mode to another than a blossoming of creative genius long present ... Rundell reminds us that money matters for Donne were usually touch-and-go ... For a work of scholarship, Super-Infinite is a witty joyride of a read, wearing its erudition lightly and a bit irreverently ... Super-Infinite is both academically specialized and shot through with imagination, and so it’s maybe not for everyone.
In the hands of Katherine Rundell, Donne comes vividly to life in multiple dimensions and Technicolor prose ... Rundell follows the paper trail to plausible conclusions and writes with lively, surprising turns of phrase in nearly every paragraph.
Katherine Rundell titles her new biography of Donne Super-Infinite. It’s an ingenious way of making his difficulty sound exciting as well as formidable ... she writes with both the knowledge of an expert and the friendly passion of a proselytizer ... There are many such injunctions and takeaways in the book, as if the reader must be convinced that investing time in a four-hundred-year-old poet will bring moral profit as well as aesthetic pleasure ... But did Donne think of poetry as a form of instruction, a matter of moral imperatives?
This is the time-honoured trap of literary biography: great writing has a way of making fact superfluous. Rundell’s book, Super Infinite is half-biography, half 'act of evangelism', and it slips the old snare with gorgeous ease. It is equal to its subject: a sensitive, witty, slim and abundant book. If it feels less like a biography, more like a series of flying essays ordered by chronology, so much the better ... Rundell is a writer who knows the quickest way home ... This is a remarkable book: one that flourishes and burgeons in the empty spaces of Donne’s life while still letting its subject speak for his many selves.
[Rundell] is the author of several novels for children, so she knows how to tell a story briskly and crisply (if, at times, a little too chattily) ... The textual problems created by variant readings are formidable, but here Rundell, unlike her predecessors, can profit from Robin Robbins’s authoritative two-volume edition (2008).
Thoughtful ... Rundell’s prose is stylish and playful ... This comprehensive study is poetic in its own right; scholars, students, and poetry lovers, take note.
