Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling. John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London.[page 5]
In this biography of John Donne, the author sets out to examine all the facets of Donne's life from the limited surviving sources plus his poems, sermons and other writing. Quotations from Donne's work and the writings of others who knew him appear extensively throughout the work. In reading this book, the reader learns not just about the life of John Donne and of his writing but also some of the social history and politics of the time that form an important part of Donne's story.
When writing, John Donne also loved to create new words, many of which appear in the book. Katherine Rundell provides an example:
He loved to coin formations with the
super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying,
super-universal, super-miraculous. 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. It was absurd, grandiloquent,
courageous, hungry. [page 14]
At the end of the book there is a list of further reading, notes, picture credits and index. Pictures of engravings of portraits of John Donne and other people mentioned appear throughout the book.
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