Momento: John Donne’s Commonplace book People/Social John Donne marries the 17 year old Anne and is thrown in the Fleet prison by her father, amid ice-cold winds and lice The first performance of Hamlet - which Donne would, perhaps, as a great attender of plays, have gone to see John Donne composes rakish poetry as a man about town - including almost certainly “Love’s Growth” - and attends bear baiting

That’s why she has written a sparkling new biography of the poet: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. 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. 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. 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. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of sixteenth-century England.

John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. We visit playhouses, bear-fighting pits and the poet’s marital bed to better understand Donne’s life and work. This week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets.

Super infinite donne