For the next book club, we’ll be discussing the life of the most famous poet that you didn’t know you knew. “No man is an island.” That’s him. “Never send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Also him. To give you an idea of how influential he was, those lines are from the same poem.
A person so talented must have lived many lives, and Katherine Rundell portrays his life in twenty different stages, with titles like “The Inexperienced Expert of Love” and “The (Unsuccessful) Adventurer.” Rundell’s sheer passion for Donne is infectious, and the way you so easily share in her wonder makes it unsurprising that she also writes popular children’s books.
In many ways Donne was ahead of his time–slicing through gender binaries and embracing the messiness of love and sex–but Rundell’s most salient point is that the dread and bliss in the lives of people from centuries ago is no different from our own, even if some of the context has changed. With that in mind, Rundell rightly claims that, “reading Donne is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mood of thought. It’s not that he was a rebel: it is that he was a pure original.”
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