Katherine Rundell’s “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne” is a gorgeous biography of the poet. Language, his poetry tells us, is a set, not of rules, but of possibilities. Donne save his most ruthless scorn for those who chew other wits’ fruit’, and shit out platitudes. It is necessary to shake language until it will express our own distinctive hesitations, peculiarities, our own uncertain and never-quite-successful yearning towards beauty. To read Donne is to be told: kill the desire to keep the accent and tone of the time. The meat was mine, the excrement’s his own. He imagined them chewed up and expelled:įor if one eat my meat, though it be known Others’ wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous mawĭonne imagined his own words taken by another. He is at his most scathing writing about originality, and those who would steal the ideas of better men:īut he is worst who, beggarly, doth chaw He wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe he wanted it to flash out at unexpected moments. (And for those who bristle against the use of ‘disinterested’ to mean ‘not interested’ rather than ‘lacking a vested interest’: Donne was the first to do so, and we must take it up with him.) Apprehensible, beauteousness, bystander, criminalise, emancipation, enliven, fecundity, horridness, imbrothelled, jig. He accounts for the first recorded use in the “Oxford English Dictionary” of around 340 words in the English language. He was an inventor of words, a neologismist. He created new rhythms jn poetry: Johnson said that Donne, ‘for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging’.
Human experience exceeds our capacity to either explain or express it: Donne knew it, and so he invented new words and new forms to try. Donne did not want to sound like other poets. His work, for Johnson, was improper and ugly and broken - it was ‘produced by a voluntary deviatuon from nature in pursuit of something new or strange’.īut that was exactly it. Years later, when Samuel Johnson compared Donne’s ‘false wit’ withh Pope’s ‘true wit’, it wasn’t a throwaway comment: it was real anxiety that Donne might be nigh-on insane. “Parnell and Pope and their many allies were men who believed that art had rules: that poetry was a monovocal exercise that there was one poetic voice, and we should stick to it.
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