In 1611, John Donne composed a funeral elegy for 14-year-old Elizabeth Drury. It contained one of his most brilliant, unsettling lines: “One might almost say, her body thought.” Donne portrayed body and soul as radically, delightfully commingled.
This is a poem that has long excited Donne commentators. John Carey, in his landmark 1981 Life, Mind and Art, was fascinated by Donne’s conviction that, as he wrote in a sermon, “all that the soul does, it does in, and with, and by the body”. Now the academic and children’s writer Katherine Rundell puts the poem centre stage in a book she describes as “both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism”. For Rundell, Donne is writing into being a new ideal: a “completed meshing of body and imagination”.
Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. “The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.”
The facts of Donne’s life are well known. In addition to Carey’s study, there’s a recent comprehensive biography by John Stubbs. Donne was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution; family members were imprisoned and tortured. Donne moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Then there were years as the impoverished, frustrated father of 12 children (six died), a period of grief after his wife’s early death and his final efflorescence, at once unexpected and inevitable, as a clergyman who was swiftly promoted to dean of St Paul’s.
It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before, dwelling on the daring of Anne’s acceptance of this man at a time when upper-class young women obeyed their fathers and, crucially, demonstrated their virtue by being unwooable. This is a love story, yet few of Donne’s love poems were written for Anne, and Rundell is good, too, on Donne as the swaggering womaniser who in reality had very little sex. She is convincing in her suggestion that Donne wrote his most satisfying erotic poems not for his lovers but for an audience of male friends.
In effect, then, poems such as The Flea are exercises in showing off about women, and Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on. In his Paradoxes, Donne pushed arguments to often ludicrous limits, comparing women to “fleas sucking our very blood”. Rundell doesn’t diminish the repellence of these, but she also points out that the absurdity is the point – he may even have been taking on the arguments of others and demonstrating their nullity. She doesn’t want Donne to be perfect; this is a poet who dazzled in making perfection out of imperfection. And the misogyny of his prose doesn’t negate the expansive equality of his best erotic poetry – his belief, as Rundell puts it, that you can find “eternity through the human body of one other person”.
Eternity, in its particular manifestation as infinity, is Rundell’s central theme. This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an “infinity merchant”. In embracing infinity, he turned eternity into a mathematical concept, and there is pulsing excitement to his quest for this quality, which runs through his writing about sex, death and God – his three great subjects. To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness.
• Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
