DONNE ROAMIN’: POET, LOVER AND PREACHER
Super-Infinite: The Transformations Of John Donne Katherine Rundell
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Best known as an author of children’s books, Katherine Rundell is also a scholar of the Renaissance at All Souls, Oxford, and this biography of the poet and priest John Donne (right) is grounded in research she undertook for her doctorate. But don’t let that put you off: this isn’t some dry academic tome but a sharply animated and imaginative account of a remarkable figure.
Unlike his near-contemporary Shakespeare, we know quite a lot about Donne: his life is richly recorded in letters and a memoir written by his friend Izaak Walton. Had Rundell wanted to, she could easily have moulded his story into a novel along the lines of Wolf Hall – Donne has something of the same enigmatic and conflicted personality as Hilary Mantel’s hero, Thomas Cromwell.
Born into a prosperous family and educated at Oxford and the Inns of Court, Donne was ambitious. Handsome and a dandy, he appears to have been something of a womaniser, though Rundell believes he was more flirt than predatory seducer.
Largely inspired by his wife Anne (who bore him 12 children in 16 years), he uses the word ‘love’ more than any other except ‘and’ or ‘the’. He is a poet of the bedroom, relishing a woman’s naked body as if it was a world to explore and conquer – ‘O my America, my New-Found-Land’.
Donne’s early adult life was a struggle against illness and poverty. He took some diplomatic and administrative jobs and briefly served as a member of Parliament, but at the age of 36 he could write ‘to this hour, I am nothing’.
What he began to exploit, however, was a gift for flattery and rhetoric, exploited in brown-nosing begging letters to aristocrats and funeral elegies written to order. These brought him to the notice of James I, who made him his personal chaplain.
Religion then became central to his work. Donne’s background was Catholic – 11 of his relatives died for their faith – and the extent to which his conversion to Anglicanism was coloured by opportunism is unclear. But it was a shrewd move because, as a widower aged 49, he was promoted to Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was, says Rundell, ‘a fantastic piñata of a job’, which came with many perks and a hefty salary.
Donne now turned his talents as a wordsmith to become ‘the star preacher of the age’, his pulpit performances enthralling audiences. Interpreting his ‘metaphysical’ poetry may be akin, thinks Rundell, to ‘cracking a locked safe’ but his sermons are starkly direct in confronting the questions of sin and death, soul and flesh. He may not have been a comforting writer, but he was certainly a powerfully disturbing one.