In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt tries to make the case that Lucretius' poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) is (a) a supremely beautiful work of art and (b) a key influence in the development of Renaissance thought. In my opinion, he failed to show either of these things.
With respect to the aesthetic qualities of De rerum natura, Greenblatt asserts them repeatedly but never even attempts to give us a sense of the poem. The only chapter that deals with the poem directly gives a bullet-pointed summary of its arguments. Maybe it's only beautiful in Latin? At no time did I find myself itching to pick up a copy.
Most of the book is about the discovery of the poem in a monastic library in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, and about the late Medieval world of the time. These are the best parts too, where Greenblatt's conversational writing style sounds like the narration to accompany a PBS miniseries. Once Bracciolini distributes copies of the poem to a few of his humanist friends, Greenblatt really has to strain to claim wide influence for Lucretius. The main "dangerous" ideas from De rerum natura were already in circulation — as Greenblatt acknowledges in his preface — and there's little evidence that the poem itself had much influence over the development of modern thought.
With respect to the aesthetic qualities of De rerum natura, Greenblatt asserts them repeatedly but never even attempts to give us a sense of the poem. The only chapter that deals with the poem directly gives a bullet-pointed summary of its arguments. Maybe it's only beautiful in Latin? At no time did I find myself itching to pick up a copy.
Most of the book is about the discovery of the poem in a monastic library in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, and about the late Medieval world of the time. These are the best parts too, where Greenblatt's conversational writing style sounds like the narration to accompany a PBS miniseries. Once Bracciolini distributes copies of the poem to a few of his humanist friends, Greenblatt really has to strain to claim wide influence for Lucretius. The main "dangerous" ideas from De rerum natura were already in circulation — as Greenblatt acknowledges in his preface — and there's little evidence that the poem itself had much influence over the development of modern thought.
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