by Katherine Rundell [2022, Farrar, Straus & Giroux]
p. 5
Sometime religious outsider
and social disaster, sometime
celebrity preacher & establishment
darling, John Donne was incapable
of being just one thing. He
reimagined and re-invented himself,
over and over: he was a poet, lover,
essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant,
preacher, satirist, politician, courtier,
chaplain to the King, dean of the
finest cathedral in London. . .
Donne loves the trans- prefix:
it's scattered everywhere across
his writing -- transpose,
translate, transport, transub-
stantiate. In this Latin preposition
he saw both the CHAOS and POTENTIAL
of us. We are, he believed, creatures
born transformable.
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