It was absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Donne wanted to know something larger than infinity. He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. Personally, though, I found it says nothing new but in effervescent prose. So I'd recommend this to anyone who has never read about Donne's life before: this is lively and pacy and makes Donne more or less understandable to a modern readership. I never felt his presence, Ann is no more than a shadow, and this doesn't engage in detail with either Donne the poet or the 'other' Donne (Dr Donne as opposed to Jack Donne, man about town, as the traditional split goes): the man who wrote Biathanatos on suicide at a time when people were still burning for the sake of religious doctrine just isn't there. 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. 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.
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