John Donne’s love poetry is sexy and appeals to 21st-century sensibilities, argues the author of a new biography
Faber & Faber; 339 pages; £16.95. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September; $30of both James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” fall in 2022. Reflecting on those twin monuments of modernism, readers might also give some thought to the writers of the past whom those authors revisited or revered.
Do readers today still feel as Eliot did? Yes, says Katherine Rundell in “Super-Infinite”, a new biography. She proclaims that “Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language” and finds his love poetry sexy and appealing to 21st-century sensibilities. She argues for Donne’s uniqueness, perhaps exaggerating: Shakespeare, for instance, is equally frank, but then his sonnets are weighed down with a guilt and self-disgust quite foreign to Donne’s cheerfully boastful randiness.
The inconsistency is not untypical and Donne’s life itself was “various and unpredictable”. Though the book’s author is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, “Super-Infinite” is not an academic tome. It is a short, lively, stimulating biography, good on local colour and the historical context. Ms Rundell is a skilled storyteller and an observant reader but her critical analyses are sometimes hazily subjective. At times she tries too hard to please her younger readers.
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