Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna

 

With its otherworldly woodcuts and ornate descriptions of imagined architecture, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili brims with an obsessive and erotic fixation on form. Demetra Vogiatzaki accompanies the hero as he wanders the pages of this quattrocento marvel, at once a story of lost love and a fever dream of antiquity.
 

                     After falling asleep on the couch, Poliphilo finds himself on a broad and wild plain. Seeking shelter, he                                       grows drowsy once again, and enters a dream within the dream

 
Poliphilo’s eyelids finally close as the sun rises. His memory is tormented by Polia, whom he first glimpsed through a window in Treviso. Her chastity is non-negotiable: in a time of plague, she has sought spiritual purity. Yet Polia’s resistance only makes her suitor more desperate. On May Day, 1467, exhausted and heartbroken, Poliphilo finally gives in to a dream — the only space of requite. With its conjured worlds and strange architectural landscapes, few visions in Western literature have been scrutinized more than the vision Poliphilo had on that morning.
 
We know about this dream thanks to a manuscript that landed in the hands of Leonardo Crasso, a jurist of Verona who saw it fit to make the story public. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili — or, as the book came to be known in English, “Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream” — was eventually published by the renowned Venetian press of Aldus Manutius in 1499. It was the first fully illustrated book produced by Aldus, a printer whose reputation stemmed from his vast humanist erudition and devotion to classical literature. Structured as a “dream within a dream”, the narrative weaves together mythological, biblical, and occult references to construct a universe filled with ruinous landscapes and orgiastic celebrations. No cost was spared by Crasso; Poliphilo’s dream is visualized across 234 folio-sized pages, which feature nearly two hundred woodcut illustrations of unparalleled mastery for their era. In Redmond Burke’s words, the editio princeps was “the most beautiful incunabulum ever printed”. Yet Hypnerotomachia did not fit comfortably on Aldus’ august shelves. Its licentious content quickly turned into a matter of controversy, stirring speculation on the conditions and purpose of the incunabulum’s production.

           On the right, The Worship of Priapus, featuring nineteen women and five men. In the foreground, priestesses sacrifice                    an ass beneath the phallic god’s herma —

 

            A fountain of the “little Priapus”, featuring a weight-sensitive step that, when depressed, “raises the child’s instrument”,             spraying Poliphilo’s face with cold water

For all that we know, the original “dreamer” remains unidentified. Written in an idiosyncratic hybrid language fusing Italian, Latin, and Greek, and replete with inauthentic Egyptian hieroglyphs and an abundance of architectural and botanical jargon, the rambling text of Hypnerotomachia does little to dispel the mystery of its authorship, even though it does mirror with remarkable accuracy the composite, winding nature of its contents. An acrostic formed by the first letter of each chapter, reading “Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit" (Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia) led scholars to identify a Dominican monk from Treviso as the author of the book. Nevertheless, the polymathy of Poliphilo — along with the cryptic and playful nature of the work as a whole — has raised doubts regarding the plausibility of this hypothesis, with some critics suggesting that “Colonna” could be a pseudonym.
 
Hypnerotomachia has been described as a “tableau of rich inventions”, “a romantic version of an encyclopedia”, and a “treasure house of aesthetic descriptions”. The name “Poliphilo” translates both as “lover of Polia” and as “lover of many”. And it is indeed an erotic curiosity that spills over from his pursuit of Polia, sublimated into an almost amatory infatuation with many forms of architecture. The dream follows Poliphilo’s meandering footsteps as he wrestles with mythical creatures and his own impulses in a series of fantastical worlds. His eyes alight on imagined monuments, statues, and follies. Myriad species of plants, growing silently in these chasmous structures, dissolve into blossoming orchards and forests populated by dragons, nymphs, and carnivorous wolves. From magic lamps to ornate corals, everything is meticulously recounted by Poliphilo, as his insatiable curiosity becomes the primary force that propels him into action, fixing together the disjointed scenes of his journey.

                       A terrified Poliphilus fleeing from the dragon

 

                   A colossal bronze horse upon a pedestal, featuring sculpted genii unable to grip the steed due to its “great speed                          and   hard jolting”

Designed to draw its reader into the seductive delirium of Poliphilo’s odyssey, Hypnerotomachia is perhaps the first secular iteration of an immersive virtual world to be granted a comprehensive and consistent architectural presentation. Throughout the book, the figurative rhetoric of chivalric love is brought into a playful union with the visual conventions of fifteenth-century architectural treatises. Important here is not only the attention given by the author to the architectural staging of a literary dream, but the way in which the dream, in turn, seems to infiltrate and overtake the design of this outlandish scenery.
 
The bewildering shapes of the various structures encountered by Poliphilo along his journey — colossal statues, pyramidal temples, and elaborate fountains, among other edifices — depart radically from the principles of composition found in canonical historiography, calling to mind a number of mythical antiquities that haunted the dreams of architects at the time. For the historian Liane Lefaivre, this association between composite architecture and the recombinant imagination is best illustrated by the Temple of the Sun, a jumble of unrelated parts that are stacked to create a monument of unthinkable dimensions.

                                The Temple of the Sun, constructed of white Parian marble, with 1410 steps and a                                                                         cornucopia-clutching winged figure

                                
 
   “Considered vertically, the building is an unlikely compilation of elements. On top of the temple is a plinth, and on top of the plinth is a pyramid, and on top of the pyramid is a monolithic stone cube and on top of the monolithic stone cube is an obelisk and on top of the obelisk is a bronze statue of a nymph holding an inverted cornucopia. Poised on one leg with the other elevated in arabesque, she pirouettes on a pivot with every shift of the wind, emitting a deafening shriek with every turn. “”
 
Hypnerotomachia abounds with similar piles ranging in size from massive to miniscule. See, for example, how the principle of the obsessive piling in the “Temple of the Sun” is repeated in the idiosyncratic formulation of the “admirable Coral Bush” and the “Perpetual Fountain”; two among the countless “miraculous” objects encountered and assiduously described by Poliphilo in his narrative. Organic and inorganic elements are here arranged vertically without any discrimination in terms of their materials, shape, or strength, producing ornamental ensembles of obscure aspiration. It is interesting to note, however, that in the Aldine edition of Hypnerotomachia, woodcuts flatten the voluminous splendor of these objects into linear compositions. The result conveys a paradoxical feeling of surface and depth that not only matches the symbolic nature of dreaming, but also the various undecipherable inscriptions and pseudo-hieroglyphs that the protagonist discovers along his journey.

                     Left: an ornate vessel decorated with “marvelous artificial foliage, such as is not made in our times” and surmounted by a cubit-high coral tree, which is nested in a hillock “studded with incomparable gems”. Right: a perpetual fountain with harpies, scintillating emerald leaves, and a golden pomegranate tree with coral flowers containing “calyxes full of golden bees”

 

                An ivory sarcophagus, containing two perfectly preserved corpses, decorated with so-called Egyptian hieroglyphs. Poliphilo interprets the sequence of emblems as follows: “To the blessed shades. Death spurns all life’s contrary and rapid things. It gives, it takes, it consumes, it dissolves. Here it has sweetly united two dead ones who loved mutually, strictly, and ardently.” 

The origins and meaning of these runes have been traced in the contours of ancient and modern dream theories, from Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica all the way to the Freudian Dream-work, where repressed drives are organized by the unconscious into condensed, encrypted representations able to evade the censorship of waking reason. Extending this premise, critics see the monuments encountered by Poliphilo as the agonizing embodiments of his elusive beloved — or, architectural ideal. Yet it is perilous to assume a direct affinity between form and cognition. In the case of Hypnerotomachia, this would reduce architecture and dreams to their faint, distorted replicas: the dream, in the words of Michel Foucault, to “a mere rhapsody of images”, and architecture to a decontextualized play of forms.

                     Poliphilo surrounded by remains of classical antiquity. A ferocious wolf eyes him with its jaws agape

 
 Hypneromachia’s illustrations of architectural and ornamental objects appeared during the period when printing presses were replacing the handcraft aesthetic of illuminated manuscripts. An unprecedented exactitude of images, achieved by innovations in printing techniques during the second half of the fifteenth century, brought forth a new visual culture in which knowledge could be recorded and transmitted in a format that remained identical from copy to copy.10 Through the skillful orchestration of type, text, and image, Poliphilo’s dreamworld expands and contracts continuously, pulsating between the fragile solidity of architectural stereography and the planar mechanics of the printing press.
 
Although in most cases the woodcut technology’s abstraction is able to delineate the features of these admirable structures, in other cases, such as that of the Temple of Venus Physizoa, the descriptive texture in Poliphilo’s ekphrastic frenzy far exceeds the representational refinement of wooden block reliefs:
 
“The huge dome displayed the greatest evidence of workmanship more nearly divine than human; but if it were human, it aroused astonishment that human ingenuity should make such an ambitious attempt in the founder's craft: for I judged that its great vastness had been made in a single solid fusion and casting of metal. I was astonished and overwhelmed by what I deemed to be impossible. Be that as it may, this bronze work consisted wholly of a vine sprouting from beautiful vases of the same material that were ranged perpendicularly above the columns. Thence they spread out branches, sprouts or shoots, and tendrils of dizzying intricacy, perfectly fitting the convex curve of the dome and all of the appropriate thickness. There were leaves, bunches of grapes, infants climbing and plucking them, flying birds, lizards and snakes, all modelled exactly from nature; and in between it was all transparent.””
 
Poliphilo’s description unfolds through a marvelous enhancement of his perceptual abilities. As his (inner and outer) vision sharpens, the interior of the temple dissolves into an infinite array of details, organized in continuously magnified pictorial scenes. Despite its virtuosity — and impressive awareness of contemporary artistic conventions — the orthogonal section of the Temple of Venus fails to convey the edifice’s complexity. A complexity that seems to transcend not only the limits of representation, but also those of human comprehension.

                          Section and ground-plan of the Temple of Venus Physizoa, whose spire is capped by a bronze crescent                                         moon and an eagle with its wings akimbo

 
In the centuries that followed its enigmatic appearance, Hypnerotomachia came to represent a type of architectural and artistic invention that derives its sensuous, eccentric qualities from the cryptic world of dreams, rather than from the orderly forms usually associated with Renaissance aesthetics. Yet, besides its multiple references to and deviations from architectural rules, the world in which Hypnerotomachia unfolds presents astounding continuities with the broader religious, civic, and cultural context of Venice at the time. The ruination of the world in which Poliphilo wanders coexists with the marvelous monuments he encounters in a way that is reminiscent of the double function of Christian icons in this period. For Hans Belting, the icon’s intentional fragmentation of pictorial space pointed to a transcendental world that remained intact. Accordingly, the kind of memory that these artworks heralded had “both a retrospective and, curious as it sounds, a prospective character”. The icon was not only a trace of something from the past but also something that was promised in the future. A similar dynamic is at play in Hypnerotomachia, against the backdrop of the Venetian art scene and the work of Vittore Carpaccio in particular.
 
Investigating the various strategies mobilized by fifteenth-century Venetian artists to represent the past, Patricia Fortini Brown observes the imaginative re-creation of a sensuous Arcadian antiquity in works like Hypnerotomachia. This was not merely an echo of the paradisiacal travel reports from the Aegean islands to which Venice had privileged maritime access. It also reflected a peculiar quality shared by architectural and religious drawings at the time, namely the simultaneous invocation of multiple temporalities.

                                   Vittore Carpaccio, Dead Christ, ca. 1520

                        Detail from Vittore Carpaccio, Dead Christ, ca. 1520

 
In Carpaccio’s Dead Christ (ca. 1520), for example, a landscape reminiscent of Hypnerotomachia unfolds around the body of the slain savior. Almost Byzantine in its execution, the scenery is rocky and desolate, with opened graves, skulls, broken tombstones, columns and slabs: fragments of what would have been seen as pagan ruins. In the background of the image, however, appear two figures in Quattrocento attire and pastoral attitude, happily playing musical instruments. Like Poliphilo and Polia, these figures function as “time travelers”, contemporizing antiquity for the beholder, while intruding into a past that will be forever unattainable. In the pages of the Renaissance architectural treatise, the “downward movement of imitation”, bringing the present back into the past, and the “upward motion of invention”, in which the past serves as a model for the future, are also merged in a similar “chiasm”, argues Anne-Marie Sankovitch. The latter creates uncanny structures built on the logic of dreams — like images drawn from one's memories to project a yet-to-be-realized reality.
 
 

                    Poliphilo looking through a bower at Polia, who approaches from a distance. “She had such a presence and charming elegance that perhaps even amorous Idalia did not appear thus to warlike Mars, nor the handsome shepherd Adonis to her, nor the delicate Ganymede to almighty and inflamed Jupiter, nor beautiful Psyche to ardent Cupid”

        

                        From left to right: a weathercock, with genius blowing the trumpet; a box tree pruned into the shape of a man, whose feet rest on vases, and arms support an ornament of towers and arch; another box tree, this one pruned in the shape of a centrepiece; and the decorative crowning of the Temple of the Sun

 
Under the guise of the dream, Hypnerotomachia seems to present a new symbolic universe in which the complicated relationship between ancient and modern space could be redefined. In his influential book, Unearthing the Past, Leonard Barkan showed how the pace at which antiquities were being unearthed in the late Quattrocento brought forth a sea change in historical, political, and aesthetic thought. These resurfaced objects didn’t just challenge established views on the past. They also generated new kinds of artistic expression and appreciation, including the production and circulation of drawings and ekphrastic narratives, the first private collections of antique fragments, and new forms of theory and practice that embraced architecture’s inventive as well as restorative potential.
 
Yet Hypnerotomachia is much more than an architectural manifesto. These intricate negotiations also seem to emerge through the orchestration of Poliphilo’s and Polia’s triste. Almost halfway through his dream, Poliphilo encounters the beloved and embarks with her on a journey to celebrate their union. The dreamworld appears to have diminished Polia’s resistance; receptive to Poliphilo’s advances, the woman sets off to explain her former hesitations and recent change of mind.

                  A sequence from Polia’s narrative: “a furious goddess crowned with a wreath of agnus castus, with an unstrung bow and empty quiver, who turned a frightful countenance on me, burning with the desire to wreak cruel vengeance”

 
 
By honoring the vow she took during the plague that ravaged her hometown, Polia dutifully safeguarded her emotional and bodily boundaries against a courtship that she saw as a risk to her life. “No sooner did I see him before me”, she describes of a meeting with Poliphilo, “than I felt polluted [contaminata]”. Hiding alternatingly in the shrine of Diana’s temple and in the privacy of her bedchamber, Polia almost succeeds in avoiding her suitor’s pursuit. It is only after experiencing a revelatory vision of her own that she begins to doubt her resistance. She dreams about a graphic, supernatural violation of body and soul — a Cupid-like winged boy playing the dismembering executioner — representing the societal violence that awaits should she continue to reject the company of a male companion. Rarely acknowledged by scholarship, the author’s decision to give Polia a voice and dream of her own remains one of the most daring propositions of the book.

                    Polia witnesses maidens “whipped incessantly by a winged youngster” who then murders them with an iron sword “without the slightest indulgence or pity”

 
 
Much like Nausicaa’s visitation by the goddess Athena in the opening of the Odyssey’s sixth rhapsody, Polia’s vision at the closing of Hypnerotomachia reaffirms the primacy of a patriarchal, civic order over the sovereignty of a female body. Unlike Nausicaa, however, who was chastised for the messiness hidden behind the ornate doors of her bedroom, Polia is forced to give up idealistic purity and embrace the disturbing disorder of Poliphilo’s world. This reversal becomes all the more pronounced considering how the tactility of Nausicaa’s messy trousseau gives way to fully fledged architectural pandemonium in Hypnerotomachia.
 
As the protagonist digresses in the warped space-time of dreaming, Polia’s narrative comes to fold the creative potential of Poliphilo’s imagination back to the source of its departure: a mundane room in fifteenth-century Treviso. And when Poliphilo finally awakens, he is alone. Polia has vanished, along with the architectural fantasies that populated his dream. Her ultimate disappearance signals the most radical gesture in a book that wrestles with the enigma of its own creation.

                             Poliphilus alone, writing to his beloved Polia

 
 
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Architecture of Dreams. By Demetra Vogiatzaki. The Public Domain Review, September 28, 2022.

 

“Reader, if you wish to hear briefly what is contained in this work, know that Poliphilo tells that he saw remarkable things in a dream, hence he calls the work in Greek words ‘the strife of love in a dream’. He represents himself as having seen many ancient things worthy of memory, and everything that he says he has seen, he describes point by point in the appropriate terms and in an elegant style: pyramids, obelisks, huge ruins of buildings.” With these words, Francesco Colonna introduces his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in 1499, at the closing of the age of the incunabulum. A Dominican friar living in Venice, he waited for thirty years before his manuscript, completed in 1467, was published by Aldus Manutius. This was partially due to the cost of the undertaking, for the volume, together with its 174 woodcuts by an anonymous artist, was one of the most extravagant publishing ventures of its day. English readers have had to wait a lot longer, until this 1999 edition that appears exactly 500 years after the entry of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili into the Renaissance literary canon.
 
Often mentioned as one of the most handsomely produced books in the Renaissance, the first edition of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is exceedingly rare. Many surviving copies have been mutilated by readers wishing to possess some of its opulently designed woodcuts. It is, therefore, all the more rewarding that the present publication attempts to convey the beauty of the original by adhering to its size, as well as to the layout of the text and the images. Adding to the appeal of this English edition for bibliophiles is its typeface, favored by Aldus Manutius and known by modern printers as “Poliphilus.”
 
Indispensable to any study of the Renaissance obsession with the lost world of Antiquity, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is more admired than actually read. Part of the reason for this is the notorious difficulty of the original language, a fanciful linguistic idiom based on Latin vocabulary and Italian morphology and syntax, challenging even for Colonna’s contemporaries. A labor of love for Joscelyn Godwin, this translation follows his earlier forays in the intellectual history of the early modern world, most notably his publications on the seventeenth-century philosophers Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher.
 
The story—ostensibly a retelling of a long and involved dream that takes Poliphilo through a landscape filled with ruins, tablets with inscriptions and hieroglyphs, and other magnificent or curious remnants of Antiquity—is both autobiographical and allegorical. Like Dante and his Beatrice, or Petrarch and his Laura, Poliphilo pursues an ideal lover, a nymph by the name of Polia. And, like these illustrious examples, he is doomed to lose her at the moment of their closest embrace, as her body disappears into the air, ending both his dream and his book. While the exact meaning of this symbolic account is as elusive as Poliphilo’s pursuit, the author hints at his allegorical intent throughout, beginning with the names of the two main protagonists. That Poliphilo (literally “the lover of Polia”) is his alter-ego, is suggested by the closing words of the nymph in which she calls him a “column of her life” (Italian “Colonna”). Polia’s own name, deriving from the Greek term for “old age” or "antiquity, " is generally understood as a hermeneutical key to the overall theme of this dream-book.
 
Like its language, the literary genre of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is truly a hybrid one, combining the conventions of romance, travelogue, and antiquarian treatise in an ever-changing narrative. To follow Poliphilo’s descriptions of the temples and monuments encountered on his imagined journey is to delve into an assemblage of favorite Renaissance topoi. At the same time, this learned fabric is interwoven with passages detailing his desire for Polia, whose undisguised eroticism brings to mind the popular contemporary literature of a more lascivious bent. In this manner, as stressed in the dedicatory preface to the 1499 edition, he fashioned a book for many audiences, a cornucopia of knowledge that could rival the work of the ancients, and be presented with a pleasing grace and novelty.
 
Notwithstanding its textual eccentricity, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has had a rich pictorial and literary legacy. Mantegna, Titian, Lotto and Bernini, to name but a few of the artists it inspired, eagerly drew upon its opulent, often enigmatic imagery. Equally important was the impact of this volume on emblem books, the principal vehicle for the dissemination of visual and poetic tropes in the seventeenth century. From Alciatus and Valeriano, to lesser known authors such as the Antwerp poet Jan van der Noot, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was a favorite sourcebook of Renaissance commonplaces.
 
Though its publishing history prior to 1999 includes a number of translations, most of them are abbreviated versions of the original. Notable among them, at least in terms of the wider circulation of the text in Europe in the century following its writing, was the 1546 French edition: Hypnerotomachia, ou, Discours du Songe de Poliphile. The first and only attempt to translate this work into English before Godwin was made in 1592, as Hypnerotomachia The Strife of Love in a Dreame (London, Simon Waterson). Thwarted by the scope of the undertaking, the translator R.D. (usually identified as Sir Robert Dallington, a courtier and man of letters), stopped about two fifths into the text, leaving the English readers for the next few centuries with a little more than a foretaste of Colonna’s fertile imagination.
 
In the brief and excellent introduction to the present edition, Godwin notes that his translation project would have been a lot more difficult without the critical edition of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1968, reprinted in 1980 with a new Preface and Bibliography). Unlike that scholarly volume, he intended this translation for a more general audience interested in the culture of the Renaissance. As he observes further, while he tried to preserve the spirit of Colonna’s literary style, he knew that by rendering it in plain, standard English, he would inevitably lose some of its linguistic wit.
 
Notwithstanding this recognition of the limits of any translation, Godwin proves himself a skillful interpreter of Colonna’s eccentric language. Thus, when Poliphilo ventures to describe the physical charms of Polia, his words resonate with the Renaissance poetics of praise of beautiful women, sensitively captured in Godwin’s translation. Polia’s tresses are “filaments of gold with a changeable lustre” ( subtilissimi fili d’oro inconstantemente rutilanti), her “festive and radiant eyesπ are fit to turn Jupiter into a rain of gold” (festevoli et radiosi ochii, da fundere Iove in piogia d’oro), while her cheeks, “fresh roses gathered at dawn and placed in vases of purest Cypriot crystal” (fresche rose alla surgente aurora collecte, et dopoi tra vasi di mundissimo crystalo de Cypri) (145).
 
This rhetoric of desire is even more pronounced in the author’s accounts of ancient ruins, each one a document of the continuous struggle between Culture and the implacable forces of Nature. Standing at a “great ruin of walls and enclosures” (vastitate magna di muri o vero parieti) Poliphilo observes fissures filled with “salt-loving littoral cock’s crestπsaltwort and fragrant sea-wormwoodπ” (alcuni lochi vidi il literale cachile et molto kali et lo odoroso abscynthio marino) (236). At another such edifice, he marvels at “the fragments of holy antiquity” (gli fragmenti dilla sancta antiquitate) and wonders what their effects would be “were they whole” (quanto farebbe la sua integritate) (59).
 
To render Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in an English version approximating the hermetic density of the language of the original would have required philological acrobatics of doubtful merit for readers. Godwin illustrates this point by comparing two passages, the first of which is a “more faithful” translation of Colonna’s description of a Fury: “In this horrid and cuspidinous littoral and most miserable site of the algent and fetorific lake stood saevious Tisiphone, efferal and cruel with her viperine capillament, her meschine and miserable soul, implacably furibund.” As we turn to the “plain” English of the actual translation, we find a welcome respite whose deviance from the original is more a blessing than a loss: “On this horrid and sharp-stoned shore, in this miserable region of the icy and foetid lake, stood fell Tisiphone, wild and cruel with her vipered locks and implacably angry” (249).
 
Godwin may have sacrificed some of Colonna’s linguistic craftsmanship, but he has certainly shown a great sensitivity towards Colonna’s imagination and mastery of tropes. In page after page of this expansive and convoluted dreamscape, he succeeds in imparting the poetic exuberance of the original to the modern reader. Even if Godwin intended this translation for a number of different readers, it will undoubtedly rekindle the interest of art historians in this famous, if still insufficiently explored monument to the Renaissance infatuation with Antiquity.
 
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream. By Aneta Georgievska-Shine. CCA.Reviews, June 16, 2000.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hypnerotomachia, by Francesco Colonna. Translated by  Robert Dallington, 1969. 

Katherine Rundell on John Donne

 




It was 1593 and John Donne was 21: tall, dark and exquisitely moustached. He was studying law at the Inns of Court in central London, and was living high. He excelled at the business of frivolity and was elected Master of the Revels, in charge of putting on pageantry and wild parties for his fellow scholars, with raucous singing and drunken dancing of the galliard. (The dance, which involved great leaps and kicks and spins, was Queen Elizabeth’s favourite: she was said, even in her 50s, to dance “six or seven galliards in a morning”.) He was writing, for a group of male friends, rakish poetry that was beginning to make him known.
 
 
But as the year went on, the plague was spreading: the theatres were ordered to close, the bear-baiting to cease. In the streets officials wielded 3ft-long marshal wands, to swat at people who weren’t social distancing. Donne wrote to a friend a lament for the city’s swagger:

“Now pleasure’s dearth our city doth possess:
Our theatres are fill’d with emptiness;
As lank and thin is ev’ry street and way
As a woman delivered yesterday.”
 
If you fell ill, your house was boarded up with your whole family inside it for 20 days. The illness came on so speedily that they said a man could “dine with his friends and sup with his ancestors”. One man, the playwright Thomas Dekker wrote, “felt a pricking in his arm … and upon this, plucking up his sleeve, he called to his wife to stay; there was no need to fetch him anything from the market; for see (quoth he) I am marked; and so showing God’s Token, died a few minutes later.” Symptoms were fast and cruel: a racing pulse was followed by buboes – hard, red plague sores, some as large as an apple. More wealthy students retreated to the countryside as the plague advanced; others, with nowhere to go, stayed in London. Donne was one such man; his brother Henry, just arrived at the Inns of Court, was another.
 
It had always been Donne’s job to look after Henry – his younger, more vulnerable brother. In the spring of 1593, Henry’s lodgings were raided: he had been hiding a young Catholic priest in his chambers. The penalty for practising as a priest was death. Henry was thrown in jail, through which the plague was raging. Donne did not immediately visit his brother. He delayed just a few days – he didn’t have days. Almost as soon as he arrived in Newgate, Henry became feverish, tortured by buboes. He died fast. He was 19 years old.
 
Henry’s death was to be one in a series of horrors that battered Donne’s life. Born into a family hounded for their Catholicism, he lost six children, as well as his wife, Anne, who died during childbirth at the age of 33. An attempt to be a swashbuckling privateer ended in him watching sailors leap burning into the sea to drown. He thought, relentlessly, of killing himself: he wrote the first full-length treatise on suicide in the English language. There are few poets who knew greater sorrow.
 
But despite or perhaps because of it, there are also few who insisted so passionately on awe. A single human soul, he wrote, is larger than the world itself: “It is too little to call Man a little world … Man [is] the giant, and the world the dwarf.” He kept insisting – in his poetry and later, when he became the dean of St Paul’s, in his sermons, and on his deathbed – that life is an astonishment, and it behoves us to be astonished.
 
If Henry’s death changed Donne, it was to make his work only more intense, more urgent, more defiantly witty. His best verse is a triumphant call to life: it is desire, sincerity, joke, all bound into one. It’s there, for instance, in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning: the lovers are imagined as the two feet of a pair of mathematical compasses, joined eternally at the base:
 
“If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’other do;
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect as it comes home.”
 
His poetry loves the body, because Donne, unlike so many of the poets who went before him, never pretended not to have a body – “grows erect as it comes home” is a pun so obvious it might as well be a little sketch of a penis. He revelled in the real fleeting delight of it: he wrote in To His Mistress Going to Bed:
 
“Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee:
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys.”
 
Donne burst out from a poetic tradition that watched him, dismayed, as he laid waste their rules and traditions. Ben Jonson wrote that Donne, “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”. Many other poets of the time were still playing the “my lady is a perfect dove” game. Think of Walter Raleigh writing to Queen Elizabeth:
 
“A flower of Love’s own planting,
A pattern kept by Nature,
For Beauty, form and stature
When she would frame a darling.”
 
Donne saw that we need more than that: words that encompass the strangeness and mad sweep of human desire, human hunger. He summoned fleas, mathematical instruments, mythical fish, snakes, planets, kings. He chastised the sun for rising on his lover’s bed:
 
“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?”
 
He had, he wrote, “an hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning”: a labyrinthical mind. Searching for a way to note down the majestically improbable problem of being alive, he became a wild inventor of words, a neologismist. He accounts for the first recorded use of about 340 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, including beauteousness, emancipation, enripen, fecundate and jig.
 
Donne is often said to be a difficult poet. But if he is difficult, it is the difficulty of someone who wants you to read harder, to pay better attention. And when you have read and reread them, the poems open – they salute you. The pleasures of Donne are akin to the pleasures of cracking a safe: there is gold inside. And besides, why should it be easy? Very little that is worth having is easy. We are not, he told us, easy: we are both a miracle and a disaster; our lives deserve pity and wonder, careful loving attention, the full untrammelled exuberance of our imagination. When you have known vast horror, and still found glory, you do not compare loves to doves. You write: “Taste whole joys.”
 
Donne knew what it was to be ruthlessly alone. He knew dread, and fear: and that’s why we can believe him when he tells us of their opposite, of ravishments and of love.
 
 
Plague poems, defiant wit and penis puns: why John Donne is a poet for our times. By Katherine Rundell. The Guardian, April 15, 2022.

Katherine Rundell: John Donne, Super-Infinite (1601)
 
John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of sixteenth-century England. In particular, the tragic death of his younger brother who, aged just nineteen, was thrown into prison for hiding a Jesuit priest and subsequently caught the plague.
 
However Donne’s poetry isn’t defeatist – he was famous in his time for his unusual, intelligent and imaginative work, which used fleas to talk about sex and violence to talk about God. And in the view of our guest today, Katherine Rundell, Donne should be considered alongside William Shakespeare as one of the finest wordsmiths this country has ever produced. That’s why she has written a sparkling new biography of the poet: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.
 
Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. She has written for, amongst others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times: mostly about books, though sometimes about night climbing, tightrope walking, and animals.
 
Artemis Irvine talks with Katherine Rundell.
 
Travels Through Time, April 26, 2022.

Faber

Perhaps it was all because of his name. John Donne: for a poet this must have felt a little like destiny, and even in the most unlikely of moments he couldn’t resist making puns. He sat down to write a letter to the enraged father of the teenage girl he had just married in secret. A lesser man might have chosen to play this fairly straight, but not JD. ‘It is irremediably done,’ he wrote to his new father- in-law, and of course he spells it ‘donne’. His young bride’s family name was More; the jokes pretty much wrote themselves. The couple had 12 children and were, he later said, ‘undone’ by their marriage.
 
It is difficult to read Donne and not to like him, at least some of the time. This is in part because of his insistence that even the most pious of prayers might be improved with a penis joke. It is equally because his poems invite us, to an unusual degree, to feel that we might know him. Many poets play games with identity, with whether the speaker of the poem is or is not the same as the poet. Donne does something a little different, which is to circumvent this slightly tired question with an invitation to laugh along. One famous poem pictures his mistress undressing, but it is really the speaker who is revealed: in his desperate lust, his foolishness. ‘O my America! My new-found land!’ he greets her, absurdly. Everywhere, there is something raw and exposed about him. He’s like a child who plays hide and seek by closing his eyes and shouting out here I am. In ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, which is perhaps the most beautiful poem about grief in the English language, he insists: ‘Study me then, you who shall lovers be/ At the next world... For I am every dead thing.’
 
Donne turns his scholars into lovers, and as a result books about him tend surprisingly often to rise up to the sparkiness of their histrionic, funny and endlessly fascinating subject. Even the driest of textual scholarship is caught up in this Donne effect. John Carey’s idiosyncratic and brilliant 1981 study John Donne: Life, Mind and Art tracks the repeated images across the poems, prose works and sermons. Even odder and also dazzling is David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (2016), which spends 300 pages in the analysis of a single Donne sonnet. The poet has been extremely well treated by his biographers. The first to write his life was his friend Izaak Walton, who was more famous for his celebrations of fishing and whose life of Donne has a good claim to be the first literary biography. R.C. Bald’s wise, deliberate John Donne: A Life was published in 1970, followed by John Stubbs’s lively and elegant biography in 2006. Perhaps, if you are playing this game seriously, it is impossible to write a bad Donne book.
 
Katherine Rundell’s Super-infinite is a wonderfully Donnean book. It sits in a long pedigree of loving, scholarly responses to the poet, but captures with an unusual wit the variety and richness of its subject. It is neither a strict biography nor only a critical engagement with his poems, but offers instead half a riff on his life and half a love letter to him. There is a lot in the life, and Rundell gives us a quick march through.
 
Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572 and converted to Protestantism; he was at times a pirate, law student, MP (twice), priest and pornographer. We might see in his life a cartoonish version of the cliché about men being radicals in their youth and conservatives in their old age. As a hot young poet he wrote poems which baffled his contemporaries and were immediately copied into commonplace books. By the time he was 50 he was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and preacher to the king. He was rich enough to buy a Titian, and moved his old Catholic mother into the deanery with him.
 
Rundell is a fabulous storyteller. Her children’s books – The Explorer, The Good Thieves and others – rollick through sturdy plots peopled by lively characters: the plucky orphan, the twinkly-eyed grandfather. They leave other contemporary tales for children in their dust. She has the storyteller’s instinct that a strong narrative and a couple of fireworks can carry you through almost anything. The challenge she faces in writing of Donne’s life is that there are so many gaps. Nothing is known, for example, of the exact circumstances of Donne’s wedding. Faced with this, biographers respond in characteristic ways. Bald notes: ‘Neither the exact date nor place of Donne’s marriage is known, although a conjecture to the place is worth hazarding.’ This is so honest and so humble. Stubbs jumps over the gap: ‘By this time, Donne was married.’ Rundell is different. ‘And so they married,’ she writes, and with a flourish conjures up a whole novelistic scene, including the words spoken by the couple and a little speculation as to what the bride wore.
 
What Rundell values in Donne is bravado, wit, invention. He was, she writes, ‘a pure original’, and this is a wholly convincing reading of Donne. But it is also – with some irony – a familiar story, and one that previous biographers and scholars have in their own drier styles often told. Rundell observes that Donne sounds like nobody else, and that he was aware of this quality in his own poetry. ‘Donne knew that he had the seeds of something original,’ she writes, and ‘that what he was doing with the English language was fresh and different.’ To prove this, she quotes a phrase from one of his poems: ‘I sing not, siren-like, to tempt; for I/ Am harsh.’ This is a fine point, that Donne was original and knew it, and this is also a fine proof of exactly that. There is indeed something striking – even harsh – about that line-break. But the argument for Donne’s originality is itself an old one. ‘The unusualness of Donne’s poetry was quite apparent to Donne,’ writes John Carey on the second page of his book, and then proves his point by quoting exactly that same line of Donne’s.
 
The moments at which Rundell is a little conventional permit us to distinguish her own true invention: and through it, perhaps, Donne’s. Her innovations are rarely biographical. In a footnote, she describes Bald’s biography as ‘the bedrock of this book’, and her telling of the life draws from Bald’s version and to a lesser degree that of Stubbs, whose more recent biography she scarcely mentions. The life is a lovely melodrama, sometimes macho, sometimes Mills & Boon, but it is not really where Rundell’s interest lies. For her, his words are the magic: ‘Language, his poetry tells us, is a set, not of rules, but of possibilities.’ He invented new words by breaking apart and recombining the old ones. ‘Donne loved the trans-prefix’ she observes, and ‘he loved to coin formations with the super-prefix.’ (Carey, again, in 1981: Donne was ‘especially prone to invent verbs with the prefix “inter-’’’).
 
Rundell’s title Super-infinite comes from one of Donne’s own new formations, and the paradox is impatient with the limitations of language and what it can be used to describe. The book stages an often thrilling meeting between Donne and Rundell, and its basis is this supple, flexible wordplay in which sentences jump between registers and tones, between this world and the next, between everything and something more. On a portrait of the young Donne, soulful and seductive: ‘He wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in, a big lace collar, an exquisite moustache.’ On his despairs and griefs, and the deaths of his family members and too many of his young children: ‘He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.’ On the violence of his style: ‘He wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe.’
 
Phrases such as these do the work which literary critics are sometimes afraid to do. They attest to love, and perform that love, and in so doing Rundell returns us to a Donne who is new yet old, nicely paradoxical, his own man and everyone’s.
 
A pure original: the inventive genius of John Donne. By Daniel Swift. The Spectator, April 16, 2022. 

The last thing that keeps contemporary Anglican preachers awake at night is the risk of serious injury resulting from the crush of people in their congregations. As Katherine Rundell reminds us in this spirited and sympathetic biography, the risk was real enough when John Donne was in the pulpit, especially in the flower of his achievement as dean of St Paul’s. She avoids (thankfully) the cliché about the early modern preacher as a rockstar equivalent, but helps us see that someone like Donne combined the appeal of a great actor, a performance poet, and a charismatic media don – a mixture of Mark Rylance, Kae Tempest and Brian Cox.
 
People came to experience the sheer stage presence; but they also relished the physical energy of the words, the music of rhythms and cadences constructed by an expert rhetorician. And the subject matter was of intense concern: most hearers believed that what Donne was talking about had something to do with their ultimate nature and fate as human agents, and the detail of this was the topic of fierce public contest, literally a question of life and death.
 
Donne knew more than many about this life-and-death dimension. Born in 1572 into a Catholic family of Welsh origin connected with the martyred hero Thomas More, he grew up in the intense and secretive world of a religious minority subject to draconian restrictions and savage official penalties for non-compliance. As a young man studying at Lincoln’s Inn, he saw his younger brother arrested because of his involvement in harbouring a Catholic priest: the priest was executed, and Henry Donne died of the plague in prison, aged 19.
 
In the years that followed, Donne moved away from his Catholic roots, though the details are hard to chart, beginning a journey that would eventually lead him in 1615 to ordination in the Church of England. And part of this involved teaching himself to think of the Catholic culture he had grown up with in much the same terms as most of his English contemporaries did – as a sophisticatedly perverse world that weaponised suffering and death in a way careless of the fate of individuals like his younger brother, exposing innocent and ill-equipped people to lethal risks for political ends, and capable of planning large-scale atrocities.
 
Catholics in the late 16th and early 17th centuries were thought of in a similar way as we might think of Islamic State or al-Qaeda: for English Protestants, the Catholic martyr was not far removed from the suicide bomber in the modern imagination, someone who was as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. Donne was to write about these matters in his late thirties with just a touch of obsessiveness, overcompensating, perhaps, for guilt at the abandonment of his family’s costly faith.
 
But his first literary flowering was as a love poet. Rundell sensibly warns us against imagining that the astonishingly vivid, funny, exuberantly sensual verses of Donne’s twenties imply that he was an exceptionally promiscuous man. These poems are no more autobiographical than Shakespeare’s sonnets; of course they would be impossible without personal experience, but they are not chronicles of such experience, and the conventional description of the young Donne as a “rake” is probably misleading. What is undeniable, though, is that his is a deeply physical poetry of almost manic intellectual and metaphorical complexity which never wanders far from “this bed thy centre”.
 
Donne undercuts, parodies and inverts all sorts of commonplaces, scolding the rising sun for disturbing lovers in bed, telling his partner that before their coupling they were like unweaned children or snoring sleepers, and, most boldly of all, cheerfully upending the pious idea that physical love is a step on the ladder to pure, spiritual union by insisting that the whole point of spiritual communion is to culminate in physical intercourse.
 
Our bodies “are ourselves, though they are not we”; in an image he uses more than once, drawn from medieval cosmology, he presents the relation of soul to body as that of “intelligence” to its “sphere” – the shaping, ordering force, and the material landscape to which it gives consistency and purpose. A soul deprived of its embodied activity, abstracted from its role as making sense of the world’s stuff, is unimaginable (and later on, in his devotional poetry, he will give this a further twist, describing the human soul as itself a “sphere” in which the “intelligence” is devotion to God: focusing on God is intelligible only when it is giving order to the confused tangle of impulses and longings that are going on within).
 
Donne’s world is, in all sorts of important respects, medieval – meaning quite the opposite of what that word so often evokes in popular discourse now. It is a place in which connections are everywhere, in which the material stuff of the world is always “speaking” and pointing and cross-referencing. In a world like this, you can take enormous risks in playing with concepts and images, because of a confidence that things will join up sooner or later; you can launch out from a trapeze, knowing that someone or something else’s trajectory will bring them to a place where they can catch you.
 
Donne’s poetry, then, often has the flavour of an experiment: suppose we start with this image? Where will it take us? “Let man’s soul be a sphere” is a little like, “Let R be the rate of acceleration of a body with mass M.” Set up the coordinates and see what comes out. Rundell is right to underline the way in which Donne, whether writing about sex or God, sees the human body as the site of the most demanding and exhilarating explorations of what language can produce.
 
If the early love poems play with all the dimensions of delight and surprise that can surround physical love, the devotional poetry and prose linger on the equally diverse and complex realities of human mortality. “Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” as Rundell splendidly puts it, and he did so in the face of his own death, using protracted illness as an occasion for intense and intricately composed meditations, and quite literally posing for a portrait in his shroud.
 
Mortality was not a quiet cessation but an entry into an unimaginably enhanced and concentrated sensuality, the “one equal music” he evokes in a much-quoted sermon. One of the real strengths of this book is that we are encouraged to see the continuity of Donne’s imagination – and not just in its blazing metaphorical fertility but in its awareness of how readily it can be distracted by the momentary and trivial.
 
In poetry, this can be turned into a new cycle of inventiveness (that extraordinary poem “The Flea” is a case in point); in prayer and devotion, it serves more as a humbling reminder of the difficulty of focusing one’s attention on God: “I ignore God and his angels for the noise of a fly.” But something of the same spirit is there throughout: nothing is beneath notice in this kaleidoscopic world of material change. To quote Rundell again, “The human animal is worth your attention, your awe, your love.” Being aware of mortality does not divert your attention from the passing world but challenges you to think of the depth of what you experience, what you will lose, and – for Donne and his fellow Christians – what you will rediscover in some unrecognisably enriched mode.
 
A sensibility like Donne’s was never going to be comfortable company. It is not surprising that his various attempts to establish himself as soldier of fortune, civil servant, member of parliament and diplomat were not successful. Single-mindedness and professional competence were not his priorities. Most spectacularly, he jeopardised his career and his freedom by marrying the teenage daughter of an aristocratic patron without the family’s consent.
 
Rundell manages to make Anne Donne a credible and lively presence in the story, with her own pathos – a bright and well-educated young woman, doomed to a premature death by poverty and ceaseless child-bearing. It is clear that Donne was deeply in love with her before and after the marriage; yet we can wonder, as Rundell does, what Anne felt about being so often left to cope with the household while her husband desperately tried to court influential patrons (including influential ladies) and establish some kind of financial stability. He wrote some wonderful poems for her; did she get to read them?
 
No life of Donne can be a hagiography. Apart from all the ambiguities around the marriage, it is hard for the contemporary reader to stomach the humiliating flatteries that pretty much every aspiring literary figure of the era had to offer to potential benefactors. In a society still dependent on patronage to an extent we can barely imagine, very few could afford to stand on their dignity. It is tempting to reduce – as some have wanted to do – Donne’s priestly career to a last, barrel-scraping effort to find secure employment. But Rundell insists that this is a skewed picture when set against the evidence of Donne’s own letters; he is never less than serious about ordination and its demands.
 
More uncomfortably, what do we make of Donne’s “male gaze”? The erotic poetry is wonderfully inventive, witty and joyful; is it also a poetry that leaves the female partner silent and (we hope at least) compliant? Even when Donne uses erotic imagery in his devotional work, there are uncomfortable notes of violence – as in the famous “Batter my heart…” sonnet with its stark concluding image of divine rape.
 
“O my America! my new-found land!” is a deservedly celebrated line, but Donne’s roving fingers exploring the woman’s body can hardly fail to evoke the story of colonial penetration and possession that was beginning to dominate the political imagination of the age. Donne was fascinated by maps. Rundell has some good things to say about the place of maps in Britain’s political imagination in the period as part of a defence strategy, and also about how they can work as metaphors for a strange and unexplored human body, one’s own or another’s – a theme that Donne develops with gusto. But this reminds us that mapmaking was no innocent activity in this first era of transcontinental empire-building.
 
Rundell rightly cautions against writing Donne off as a misogynist. There are poems and prose passages which seem to express disgust or contempt at the female body. But as with so much of the period’s literature, we cannot know exactly what is and isn’t an exercise in conventional forms and tropes. We are on safer ground concentrating on what is not conventional and predictable – and there is no shortage of that in Donne. But this does not relieve us of the anxiety around the silent partner (“For God’s sake, hold your tongue,” as one well-known poem begins), the Other who must be encompassed, mapped and possessed – nor should it.
 
The poetry of the past, like its fiction and drama, and indeed its theology or philosophy, will often shake us by its tone-deafness to the moral registers we take for granted. It is no concession to moral relativism to say that it still deserves intelligent reading; we can even say, in many instances, that such reading helps us see how the resources of a historic text lay foundations for new perceptions that its authors would not and could not have contemplated directly. We can appreciate without absolving or ignoring – and without a desperate attempt to show that any anxieties are unfounded and that a historical author is really just an inoffensive contemporary in fancy dress.
 
We go on reading Donne, as we go on reading any serious writer, because we are surprised, frustrated, exhilarated; we resonate with the voice, and we recognise that we have work to do (on ourselves as well as on the text). Katherine Rundell does in this book what any good literary biographer must do: share that sense of work to do, as well as the wonder and delight. Donne presents an interconnected world, both human and more-than-human, “not as a burden but as a great project”, she says – recommendation enough, we might think, in a culture so damagingly confused about how we are involved in our material setting. And, she asks, unanswerably, “Who else of his peers had been able to hold grotesqueries and delights, death and life, so tightly in the same hand?”
 
The infinite art of John Donne. By Rowan Williams. The New Statesman, May 11, 2022.

If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else’s wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.

They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that we are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Maybe. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it. The Reformation was just behind them; the civil war was coming; Elizabeth, the virgin queen, may have been semi-celestial, but her subjects lived in a police state. They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne.

Donne was made of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in England was illegal—his uncle and then his brother went to prison for their faith, and his brother would die there—Donne worked his way in, into the inside, shifting and shedding as he went.

He was a bookish lover-poet who went to sea with the doomed and dashing Earl of Essex and caught a vision of hell when he watched Spanish sailors being burned alive in the harbor at Cádiz. (His Rutger Hauer–in–Blade Runner moment: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”) He was a splenetic satirist, all-observing, all-condemning, who was also a world-class flatterer/ingratiator. He had a slicing, dicing, predatory mind that he applied with equal force to sex, to politics, and finally to a religious vocation. Young Donne had an inflamed libido, old Donne an inflamed conscience. The man who wrote “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below” would become, as the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the grave divine who warned his congregants that “a man may be an adulterer in his wife’s bosom, though he seek not strange women.”

As for his poetry, it’s unlovable and it’s irresistible. English verse is not the same after Donne. Harmony and gentility—the music of Spenser—go out the window, and in comes a ferocious, sometimes grating intellectual energy and an intense superiority. You can read pages of Donne and register only the oppressive proximity of his pulsing brain. But then he’ll snag you. “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” grumbles the lover as daylight pushes in at the bedroom window. “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late school boys.” Encrusted as his vocabulary could be, he had a shocking talent for immediate, everyday speech. One moment his verse is alien, twisted, full of fussy wiring and strange mechanical conceits (Dr. Johnson: “Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?”); the next he writes “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” or “I run to death, and death meets me as fast,” and we hear him speaking to us across four centuries in ringing monosyllables.

Super-Infinite is the title of Katherine Rundell’s new biographical study of Donne. It sounds like an album by Monster Magnet. And indeed, Rundell responds to Donne in something of a heavy-metal, hyperbolizing register. Read the first stanza of “Love’s Growth,” she promises us, and “all the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you.” Another poem, “The Comparison,” in which Donne contrasts the charms of his mistress with those of another woman, takes the tradition of poets praising female beauty “and knifes it in a dark alley.” And so on.

But overpraise, or praise with reverb, is very Elizabethan and very, very John Donne, as Rundell shows us. “Compliments,” she writes, “were core currency,” and Donne was loaded. He flung out admirations; he strewed encomia. “Your going away,” he assured one Lady Kingsmill in a letter, “hath made London a dead carcass.” Rundell calls this Donne’s “pleasure in extravagance.” When Elizabeth, the young daughter of Sir Robert Drury, died, Drury (the sort of grandee to whom Donne was always sucking up) commissioned an elegy. And although Donne had never met Elizabeth Drury, he went at it with a vengeance: In two long, slightly bonkers poems, “The First Anniversary” and “The Second Anniversary,” he unfurled the full howling panorama of human existence and almost beatified the deceased girl. “She, she is dead; she’s dead; when thou knowest this / Thou knowest how dry a cinder this world is.” It was heavenly hackwork. “If he had written it of the Virgin Mary,” opined Ben Jonson, “it had been something.”

Donne’s love poetry is extreme: Bodies melt, souls commingle, genders elide, death is an atom away. For sheer piercing morbidity, what image can match the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” that he summons in “The Relic,” his fantasy of being exhumed while still wearing the tokens of his love? His religious poetry is equally extreme: “Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side,” runs one of his Holy Sonnets (more of those hammering monosyllables), in which he prays to take on the sufferings of Christ. “Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me, / For I have sinned, and sinned.” On a good day, Donne saw the world as an organic biological-spiritual unity, the famous whole where “no man is an island.” On a bad one, it became a slaughterhouse, a Boschian mill: “Th’ earth’s race is but thy table; there are set / Plants, cattle, men, dishes for Death to eat. / In a rude hunger now he millions draws / Into his bloody, or plaguey, or starved jaws” (“Elegy on Mistress Bulstrode”).
 
An extremity of perception, in the end, is where the two Donnes meet: He was a mystic in bed, and a mystic in the pulpit. The almost Tantric lover, seeking an essence beyond the body, was also the yearning-for-eternity preacher: “As soon as my soul enters heaven, I shall be able to say to the angels, I am of the same stuff as you.”

He managed his exit like David Bowie, stripping naked in the weeks before he died and wrapping himself in his winding-sheet so that an artist could make sketches for the posthumous carving of a marble monument. As a preacher, Rundell tells us, Donne’s “speciality” was his gift for riffing on infinity. One imagines his congregants at St. Paul’s creaking and shuffling in their pews as he laid the vision upon them: “There shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music.” And there it is, the final resolving power chord: the radiant wave in which all the contradictions—of the age, and of the man—would be consumed.

The Unlovable, Irresistible John Donne : The Elizabethan poet and divine was a mystic in bed and a mystic in the pulpit. By James Parker. The Atlantic, August 16, 2022.