And now Rundell where, I'd say, her own lively vision obscures Donne. And Stubb doesn't engage with the poetry. Carey's John Donne, Life, Mind, and Art is typical of Carey: opinionated, uneven, wild speculation with no evidence, but provocative and stimulating the more recent Stubb ( John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography) is a modern take using frameworks of ambition and power to assess Donne's life but, despite that title, doesn't engage with the fact that for Donne (and his peers) religion was bound up with faith, something we might struggle with in our secular society. The Bald John Donne: A Life from the 1970s remains the standard scholarly biography: dusty? yes dry? yes but all the detail we need for studying Donne is here and meticulously referenced.

Maybe the very complexity of Donne and his various metamorphoses is too much for a biographer to capture because this is the fourth biography I've read and none of them feel complete.

Rundell's vast enthusiasm is almost there in his place, a kind of simulacrum for the man. Paul’s? Super-Infinite almost convinces you they can.Rundell's writing is the star of this show: it's sparky and textured, original and alive - if she wrote a novel I'd read it like a shot - but, somehow, Donne the man sort of slips between the floorboards of this biography and never really emerges as a fully-fleshed (ha!) person.

Can the words of the dashing young clerk or struggling scribbler really illuminate the thoughts of the grandee of St. At times, this means transposing a passage composed during one period into a quite different chronological context. Rundell, like all literary biographers, cites many phrases from her subject’s writing, suggesting how they shed light on episodes from life. The account leaves a few questions, mostly concerning Donne’s religious development. 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. Instead she ransacks his poetry and prose for insight into the man himself.

There is little analysis of his artistic influences, and less of his posthumous reputation. Rundell does not attempt a feminist defense of Donne’s love poetry.she adores much of it despite any reservations. Super-Infinite hardly reads like an academic work. Super-Infinite is an attempt to crack Donne’s code.

The transformations of john donne