Super-Infinite is a biography and appreciation of the Elizabethan-era poet John Donne. The title refers to Donne's typically expansive rhetoric, full of intensifiers and transformations.
The book is clearly pitched at readers like myself who know nothing about Donne beyond "no man is an island" and "ask not for whom the bell tolls." Rundell presents him as the ultimate love poet whose work blends the sacred and the profane, the soul and the body. During his lifetime, Donne was best known for the quality of his sermons as the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.
Rundell regularly praises Donne's uniquely sensuous style, going so far as to make the "case that Donne was one of the finest writers in English; that he belongs up alongside Shakespeare." However, she doesn't provide sufficient examples or close readings to back up this claim. The snippets of his work are too short to properly illustrate his supposedly distinctive style. At other times, Rundell emphasizes the density of his writing: "He is at times impossible to understand." Bottom line: the book didn't entice me to read Donne.
Nor does Donne the person "come off very magnificently." He wrote his love poetry to entertain his smart-ass friends, made a poor marriage, spent years obsequiously courting the favor of various patrons, and treated his children badly. His biography is more interesting for what it tells us about his times than about him. For instance, everyone in Donne's social class was a poet; poetry was the social media of the day. Donne didn't publish his poetry; our primary source for it is his friends' commonplace books, which were essentially personal scrapbooks of knowledge. Just as she did with Donne's work, Rundell passes over these topics too superficially.
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