And the word most used in his poetry is “love”. With his arched eyebrows and dashing outfits, he is, according to Rundell “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – a sort of Mick Jagger of the Renaissance, who wrote about sex, she tells us, in a way that nobody has, before or since. But there is nothing dusty or abstract about her Donne. Rundell talks in the rich tones of a classical actor and has a scholar’s fluency in her subject. He offers a model of burning originality. He offers us a sense of what we might do with our minds.
And his difficulty has its own power and joy. My great hope was that I might put people in a position where they would be more readily able to unfurl what he’s doing, because he is famously difficult. “I wanted to write something that will push people towards his poetry.
“This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism,” Rundell tells the reader at the start. That the life of a 400-year-old metaphysical poet should beat shortlisted books about such issues as the migrant crisis and British colonialism is testament to the eloquence and passion of Super-Infinite. At 35, she is the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious award for nonfiction. “It was age appropriate.” So began a love affair with Donne that took off in her late teens and led to her studying his poetry for a PhD – and now winning the Baillie Gifford prize for Super-Infinite, her biography of the poet and her second book for adults (she is the author of five children’s books). “I do mean Go and Catch a Falling Star rather than To His Mistress Going to Bed,” laughs Rundell, seated in a London hotel. W hen Katherine Rundell was growing up in Zimbabwe, her parents pinned a John Donne poem by the bathroom sink for their four children to read while they were brushing their teeth.
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