Katherine Rundell’s 2022 biography Super-Infinite credits this poet with at least 340 neologisms, including “bystander,” “fecundate,” and “imbrothelled.” For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this author and prefix enthusiast who wrote of “dull sublunary lovers’ love” in a poem that states “thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.”
ANSWER: John Donne (The poem is “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”)
[10h] Donne invented the word “unperplex” in this poem to describe the purifying feeling of losing oneself in another person. In this poem, “the eye-beams” of two lovers twist together before their souls exit their bodies and mingle.
ANSWER: “The Ecstasy”
[10m] An infirm Donne used the word “vermiculation” to describe being eaten by worms in what this biographer called Donne’s “own funeral sermon.” In another book by this author, Piscator, Venator, and Auceps debate recreation.
ANSWER: Izaak Walton (The sermon is Death’s Duel; the book is The Compleat Angler.)
<Henry Atkins, British Literature>