One of our greatest love poets, John Donne had many personas, each lived with intensity

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
KATHERINE RUNDELL
(FABER & FABER, 352 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

As befits a metaphysical poet, John Donne led a paradoxical life. We remember him on the one hand as the author of some of the most playful and vigorous love poems in the English language; on the other, as a solemn clergyman whose sermons and religious verse speak to our deepest thoughts and dwell unflinchingly on death. In youth he posed for his portrait as a dandified man of the world; dying, he stripped naked and wrapped himself in a sheet to model for his monument in St Paul’s.
It is not, of course, unusual for age to confer a more sober view of the world. What sets Donne apart is the intensity he brings to each persona, and the fact that he expresses both with equal mastery. How one gave way to the other is the obvious trajectory for a biographer to follow; but in this zestful and enthralling book, Katherine Rundell takes a wider view. For her, there are not two Donnes, but a dozen. He was, she writes, “incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself over and over”. His many incarnations include satirist, politician (he was twice an MP) and maritime adventurer.

His first was an heir to recusants. He was born in 1572, when to be a Catholic in England was to live with “a constant, low-level thrum of terror”. His mother was Thomas More’s great-niece; her uncle Thomas Heywood was arrested, and probably executed, for harbouring a priest. The young Donne was taken to visit a Jesuit uncle – subsequently exiled – in the Tower of London, as well as to witness the executions of Catholic clergy. “I have ever been kept awake,” he wrote, “in the expectation of martyrdom.”