Lawyer, adventurer, secretary, MP, diplomat, priest. He never had to husband his talent: there was always more where it came from.ĭonne himself went through multiple iterations. As Katherine Rundell says, he arrived in the world “book-hungry” and so he remained: like the “hydroptique (ever-thirsty) earth” of that poem, (“A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day”) he sucked in ideas, impressions, sensations, connections, science, and poured them back transformed into poetic forms, sermons, treatises. “I am the quintessence of nothingness,” he insists, and insists again, until he achieves the very opposite of nothingness: a tomb, yes, but one heaped with dark treasure. Even when writing about death and extinction, he piles absence on absence.

He had no sense of enough: infinity was not enough, hence the title of this wonderful book. In the company of English love poets, with their cool ironising, their prophylactic mockery, their continence and equivocation, Donne blazes out like a winged unicorn in a dressage stable. Seldom has a man burned with such fervent intensity. “Because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Revelations 3:16.) Whatever problems God had with his servant John Donne, lukewarmth was not among them.

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