One remembers things at different levels.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60
1In the story and the history of the survival and reception of the works of the Greek philosopher and the Roman poet who constitute the Epicurus-Lucretius tandem across the centuries, from the fourth century BCE (Epicurus) and the first century BCE (Lucretius) up to the present time, there have been many twists and turns. This essay will review some of the ways in which Lucretius’s De rerum natura was remembered, but also misremembered and dismembered, in England in the period 1650-1750. The domain of inquiry will, in particular, concern translations, published or unpublished at the time, essentially in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and the advent of that magnum opus of early eighteenth-century poetry, the philosophical poem.
- 1 Henceforth DRN.
- 2 All quotes of DRN are from Creech’s translation. First published in 1682, the edition quoted here i (...)
2Arguably De rerum natura,1 “published” around 55 BCE, about the time of the demise of its author, Titus Lucretius Carus (c.98-c.55 BCE), has no equivalent in literary history in that it sets out to render a complex philosophy, Epicureanism, both accessible and attractive by turning it into poetry, some 7,400 lines of Latin hexameter verse. W. Y. Sellar underlines the singular character of the undertaking: “The peculiarity of the poem of Lucretius, that which makes it unique in literature, is the fact that it is a long sustained argument in verse” (307). Richard Jenkyns in his introduction to A. E. Stallings’s upbeat 2007 translation of the six-book poem, written in rhyming fourteener couplets, has described it as “a highly eccentric project, the loneliest of Latin poems,” yet it keeps good company as Jenkyns goes on to put it on a par with John Milton’s 1667/1674 Christian epic, detecting an inverted symmetry that imbricates the two poems: “whereas The Nature of Things is a didactic poem presented in heroic manner, Paradise Lost is a heroic poem presented as didactic” (Lucretius 2007, xvi, xxii). Both poems display outstanding ambition. What Sellar writes of Lucretius can equally be said of Milton: “Among his personal characteristics none is more prominent than his consciousness both of the greatness of the work on which he was engaged, and of his own power to cope with it” (295). Lucretius manages, from the opening proem (1.1-180)2 onwards with its depiction of an eroticized world, engendered and incessantly renewed and replenished by Venus who represents and instils the potency of love and attraction, and her taming of Mars, the god of war, and thus a figure of Thanatos, to intersperse the drier, necessarily more rational and explicative sections of the poem with a poetic performance of the Epicurean philosophy. He turns the matter-of-fact prose concepts, however convincing (or unconvincing) they may be to the reader, into a theatre of philosophy, where the tenets and ideas are staged and played out in a drama. The world is embroiled in a never-ending process and cycle of creation, destruction, and regeneration. Unlike Paradise Lost, there is no unfolding narrative with its major characters, Satan, Adam and Eve, and the angels, Raphael and Gabriel, not forgetting God himself, and the Son of God. The hero is the philosopher Epicurus, the plot is to convince the dedicatee, the friend and Roman praetor, Memmius, of the benefits of a life lived in accordance with the precepts of Epicurean philosophy.
3The opening paragraph of the preface to Monica Gale’s translation-cum-commentary of Book 5 of DRN, identifies several of the reasons why it remains a fertile source of critical research as well as a work of general interest and significance today:
For a work written more than two thousand years ago, in a society in many ways quite alien to our own, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura contains much of striking – even startling – contemporary relevance. This is true, above all, of the fifth book, which begins by putting a strong case against what it has recently become fashionable to call ‘intelligent design,’ and ends with an account of human evolution and the development of society in which the limitations of technological progress form a strong and occasionally explicit subtext. Along the way, the poet touches on many themes which may strike a chord with the twenty-first century reader: the fragility of our ecosystem, the corruption of political life, the futility of consumerism and the desirability of limiting our acquisitive instincts are all highly topical issues for us, as for the poem’s original audience. (v)
4“Intelligent design” was very much on the agenda in the period 1650-1750 for natural philosophers, philosophers, divines, and poets alike. Milton’s Paradise Lost set about relating how God’s providence informs all human endeavour, plots humankind’s origin, identity, and destiny, explaining and justifying “the ways of God to Man,” in his dramatic rewriting and epic staging of the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. If theodicy and intelligent design were perceived to be undermined by, and under threat from, the new sciences and the rise of religious skeptics, freethinkers and libertines, the churchmen and scientists of the Royal Society, in their majority, linked arms to attempt to square the circle and reconcile the methods of the new science, the new discoveries and advances in biology, medicine, the natural sciences, astronomy and geology, and Christian belief and doctrine, to reassure and ensure that the Book of the Word and the Book of the World (i.e. Creation) were seen to be complementary, compatible and, indeed, indissociable. No small part of the perceived threat to religious belief came from the revival of interest in Epicurean philosophy, compounded in no small measure by Lucretius’s enthusiastic exposition of its basic tenets.
5A word on the two epigraphs. The first is taken from a novel of recollections of events at once passionate, dramatic, and life-changing, that resurface in the later life of the narrator, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), a work of fiction that relates the retrieval of the buried and traumatic memories of an episode during a summer holiday in the life of a young boy when he is an elderly man. The opening sentence of chapter 8 is deceptively ingenuous: “One remembers things at different levels.” Sometimes remembering comes about in unexpected ways and in an ambivalent manner.
6The second epigraph is the opening quatrain from Shakespeare’s strategically-placed Sonnet 60 on the passage of time, the cycle of birth, life and death, and the possibility of memory expressed in literary form as a means of survival. This “sequent toil” of creation and destruction through time provides a fitting image in the case of Lucretius’s DRN to describe the uneven and at times unpredictable workings of memory; how the text has fared over the centuries from its creation to the present time, in particular concerning its reception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how it was transformed, reformed, deformed in the accompanying commentaries, but also adopted generically, assimilated in fragments and allusions, both praised and disparaged; how it informed the philosophical poems of the eighteenth century, which are, to varying degrees and in various ways, its literary progeny.
7The principles of Epicurean philosophy, as it has come down to us, are contained, for the most part, in the three letters – to Herodotus on physics, to Menoeceus on ethics, and to Pythocles on astronomy and meteorology – and the forty Chief Maxims, devoted almost entirely to ethics, that expound succinctly the apparently voluminous writings of Epicurus (341-270 BCE), and are to be found in the third-century CE work in Greek by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. They form epitomes of Epicurean philosophy, the letter being a sort of mental pocket-book-size summary of the main precepts to be retained and memorized. Lucretius, who no doubt had access to Epicurus’s missing works, was to relay this philosophy in much fuller form, in the six books of his DRN, a work which has undergone a troubled journey and reception across the centuries.
8To appreciate why Epicureanism was unpalatable in the eyes of many in the period in question here, an outline of the fundamental features of Epicurus’s philosophy will be helpful. Epicurus was born on the Aegean island of Samos, just off what is today the Turkish coast. He established around 306 BCE what became known as the Garden of Epicurus, just outside Athens, where his school of philosophy developed and prospered.
9In what sense is Epicureanism a “materialism,” a term that, in the past and up to the present, more often than not, has had pejorative associations? The world, the universe, the cosmos, are all entirely composed of only two things, invisible atoms (atomoï), meaning uncuttable or indivisible particles, and void (space, nothingness). There are, then, no spiritual i.e. non-material beings. Both animate and inanimate beings or things are made up of varying compositions of these atoms, or, more precisely, atoms-in-motion. At the same time both the mind and the soul are material and when the body dies, the soul dies with it. Atoms are recycled in a natural and unending process of birth, life, decomposition, and death, and renewal or “recycling” (but not rebirth). Epicurean gods do exist, but live at a remove, in inaccessible intermundia, blissfully unaware of, and totally indifferent to, human concerns. As there are no intervening gods, distributing rewards and punishments, there is no external force directing our destiny; there is no promise (or threat) of an afterlife. Hence Epicurus claims there should be no fear of death as when we die, we have disappeared, lock, stock and barrel, body and soul and consciousness; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, atoms to atoms.
10Such a philosophy was, then, understandably unacceptable, an abomination for the vast majority of believers in an essentially Christian society in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, be they Protestant or Catholic. While the poetry of DRN was admired, and indeed some aspects of the philosophical doctrine were approved by some commentators, the clearly anti-providentialist philosophy was rejected, very often in no uncertain terms.
11The chief concern of Epicurus is how best to live a life free from mental and physical distress and pain. Aponia refers to a state of freedom from physical suffering, ataraxia to a state where one is free from mental cares and torment. The aim in life is thus pleasure, which becomes the principal moral category, but not the pleasure associated by some with unbridled hedonism. It was a pleasure experienced when necessary natural appetites and desires were satisfied, food, drink and warmth, when unnecessary natural appetites were pursued, if at all, with moderation, and this included sexual relations for Epicurus and Lucretius. The both unnatural and unnecessary appetites such as fame, fortune, ambition etc., were to be avoided altogether. The ideal life is thus a life of frugality, avoiding, where possible, unnecessary pain.
12Key elements of this ethical philosophy are expressed in the concluding lines to one of the best-known passages of DRN, the opening of Book 2:
Blind, wretched Man! In what dark paths of strife
We walk this little journey of our life!
Whilst frugal Nature seeks for only ease,
A body free from pains, free from disease,
A mind from cares and jealousies at peace.
Now little is required to maintain
The body sound in health, and free from pain;
Not Delicates, but such as may supply
Contented Nature’s thrifty Luxury;
She asks no more. (2.16-24)
- 3 This appears as a note to the poem “Stars” from the early volume A Boy’s Will, first published in L (...)
13In this natural world made up exclusively of atoms-in-motion, and space or void, there is, then, no providential force which informs and directs the world and its destiny. The force that “directs” the world is indirection, aleatory, i.e. chance, casus. In this respect the difference between those philosophies and religions that believe in a providential, intervening God, being or beings, or force, or world soul, and Epicureans, is the fundamental distinction between a belief in the causal and the casual, between causality and casualty. According to the latter vision, as the poet Robert Frost put it: “There is no oversight of human affairs” (969).3
14There is, then, for Epicurus, no purpose in nature, no apparent teleology, no end in view, in both understandings of the word “end,” purpose and limit. There is no soteriology, nothing in any respect analogous to what was to become the Christian belief in an afterlife, and the hope of salvation. Or, if there is a soteriology, it is that humankind needs to be saved from its delusions and superstitions, what Lucretius calls religio. The universe has no limits. Time has no limit. In this cyclical, natural and unending process of birth, life and destruction for all forms of life, nothing is permanent except the atoms. That said, this physics, and this is an essential point, engenders an ethics which can be said to be a self-proclaimed teleology. The therapeutic element of Epicureanism is to be underlined here. Both Epicurus and his poetic disciple and mouthpiece, Lucretius, are healers, aiming to bring balm to our troubled and uneasy minds, souls, and bodies. Pierre-Marie Morel summarises the Epicurean position as follows:
La nature physique n’est donc pas en elle-même porteuse de sens : elle est neutre. Pourtant, la connaissance scientifique de la nature révèle les causes cachées des phénomènes, ce qui ne nous apparaît pas et dont les effets (tonnerre, tremblements de terre, épidémies) nous terrorisent souvent. Elle nous détourne ainsi des illusions communes, des peurs infondées et de la superstition. La physique abrégée de la Lettre à Hérodote participe donc de la thérapie de l’âme. Elle contribue directement à la prise en compte de la fin pratique, le telos, un telos sans téléologie. (Morel 29)
15Such a world-vision may, and most certainly did, appear scandalous and absurd to some, but for Epicureans it leads, on the contrary, to a liberation from illusions and false beliefs in false gods who intervene, who reward or punish. Having cleared the decks of all delusions, it becomes possible to examine how best to negotiate human existence. Thus, there is liberation on two counts: freedom from worrying oneself to death about divine retribution, and freedom from the fear of death itself as there is no afterlife. When you die, as the argument goes, you will no longer be around to know it, or worry about it.
16If this was anathema to the vast majority of Christian believers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some churchmen and natural philosophers sought to christianize Epicureanism as best they could, tone it down, rein it in, and make it, in some respects at least, compatible with Christian dogma. The Catholic priest and philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) in France was a key figure, indeed the key figure, in adapting the ethical precepts and atomist theory to Christian belief and dogma, his major work being Syntagma philosophicum, which was published posthumously in 1658. Gassendi’s ideas and writings were to be disseminated in England by Walter Charleton (1620-1707).
17That natural philosophers in the seventeenth century came around to espousing or at least recognizing the interest of the atomist, corpuscular theory of the composition of matter is clear, but Epicureanism, despite all Gassendi’s and Charleton’s labours, remained beyond the pale. The so-called baptism of Epicureanism was half-done, and could only ever be partial given the philosophy’s outright rejection of the immortality of the soul and of divine providence, non-negotiable lynchpins of Christian belief.
- 4 Passannante writes that Gassendi “quoted roughly 5,300 of the 7,400 lines from De rerum natura over (...)
18Gerard Passannante has suggested that Gassendi’s own assimilation of Lucretius was itself problematic and relates to the theme of involuntary effacement, of memory and forgetting: “As the material drama of fragmentation, dispersal, and assimilation takes place through the elementa of Lucretius’s poem, a materialism emerges through Gassendi’s own practices,” practices which paradoxically lead to “the virtual disappearance of the Epicurean poet” (182), with the again paradoxical conclusion: “As Lucretius dissolves into the surface of Gassendi’s philosophy, his influence becomes pervasive. Ironically, one could say, it was in trying to forget the author of De rerum natura that Gassendi turned out to be most Lucretian” (185).4
19However this may be, according to Howard Jones, if by the mid-seventeenth century the work of the purging of the offending elements of the Epicurean-Lucretian tandem had been initiated, “this had been accomplished only through a ruthless distortion of key Epicurean doctrines […]” (184). But the reception and spread of Epicurean ideas gained momentum not only with the commentaries on Epicurean philosophy, and among natural philosophers, but also, importantly, through the translation of DRN.
- 5 Chapter III of W. B. Fleischmann ’s 1964 study remains an essential reference on this subject.
20The story of the material survival and transmission of DRN over time has been well documented, including the acknowledgement of the blanks, periods when the manuscripts disappeared from view. L. D. Reynolds recounts the poem’s trail during the Middle Ages: “It would seem that Lucretius emerged towards the end of the eighth century, that the archetype of our manuscripts found its home with the Carolingian court, and that the text was disseminated from there, radiating westwards into the Low Countries and Northern France and southwards along the Rhine.” He continues: “Then, despite this promising start, Lucretius went underground for the rest of the Middle Ages, an eclipse which may be partly explained by the passionately anti-religious nature of his message. All we have until the fifteenth century are a few fleeting glimpses” (220).
- 6 Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve. How the World Became Modern retraces the story of the discovery or (...)
21For whatever reasons, then, chance and/or choice, DRN entered a state of limbo in the Middle Ages. The revival of interest began with the discovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 of a copy of the poem in an as yet unidentified German monastery.6 Poggio, as papal secretary, had accompanied the antipope John XXIII to the Council of Constance convened in 1414-18 to resolve the Western Schism. John XXIII was to be deposed in 1415 (there were two popes too many at the time), and Poggio set off in search of ancient manuscripts. The copy of DRN he discovered he had copied and sent the finished work to Florence, to Niccolò Niccoli (1364-1437), like himself a painstaking scribe and tracker of classical manuscripts. Jones writes that “Between 1500 and 1600 more than thirty continental editions of De Rerum Natura were published and at least fifteen editions and translations of Diogenes” (1981, 223). Despite the catch-up in printings and editions, the most illustrious being that of Denis Lambin in 1563/4, revised several times, as Catherine Wilson notes, “Lucretius still lagged considerably behind other ancient poets in popularity” (16). Jones makes the same point in The Epicurean Tradition: “[…] references to Epicurus or Lucretius in standard late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literary works are scant indeed compared with the frequent allusions to Plato, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Homer, and Virgil” (186). This lack of recognition and esteem, as Reynolds suggests, may be best explained by the anti-religious nature of the subject matter, and the dogged misrepresentation of Epicurus “in his medieval role as the champion of sensual living” (Jones 1992, 187), and was to be prolonged, albeit in ambivalent ways, in the centuries to follow as both Epicurean philosophy and DRN became much more visible but remained highly controversial.
22If the rediscovery, recovery and commentary of classical Greek and Latin manuscripts was an essential and defining feature of the Renaissance period, a further and decisive step forward in the sequent toil of the rehabilitation and recollection of DRN, was its translation into the vernacular languages, a task which itself proved to be an at once problematic and revealing form of remembrance and dissemination. The Latin editions formed a cordon sanitaire which had hitherto kept the prying eyes of the less educated and female sections of society safe from exposition to this materialist and atheistic philosophy. Translation, then, opened an important breach.
23The first translation of DRN into a vernacular language was the prose translation into French by Michel de Marolles in 1650. In England in the 1650s Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681) translated, but was never to publish, all six books of the DRN. John Evelyn (1620-1706), the diarist, published An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura in 1656, but the full translation of the six books by Thomas Creech (1659-1700) was only to appear in 1682. All three were in heroic couplets. There were to be other translations or adaptations of certain passages, short fragments by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, for instance, and notably by John Dryden (1631-1700) who chose passages from the poem which were published in 1685. Leaving Dryden’s translation of chosen extracts to one side for the moment, the translations of Hutchinson, Evelyn, and Creech all “remembered” and dismembered DRN, at times in overlapping ways. A few words, then, on how the translators positioned themselves and viewed their task.
- 7 Hopkins’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius provides a detailed assessment of the oft (...)
24The Puritan biographer and poet Lucy Hutchinson probably undertook her translation of the six books in the early 1650s. To embark on such a project was in itself a major undertaking and an unlikely one for a deeply religious-minded person such as Hutchinson. The manuscript was never to emerge until the two recent editions, first by Hugh de Quehen in 1996, and then in 2012 where the poem, along with an introduction, commentary and the Latin text make up the first volume of the The Works of Lucy Hutchinson established by Reid Barbour, David Norbrook and Maria Cristina Zerbino. It was only some two decades on from the translation, in 1675, that Hutchinson was finally to entrust her manuscript to the hands of Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey. It was to be accompanied by a dedicatory letter of several pages that is both a profession of her own faith and a wholesale rejection of Epicureanism in which Hutchinson evokes the conditions in which she started out on the project, surrounded by her children, and is full of self-recrimination, a protracted mea culpa acknowledging the objectionable nature of the ideas expressed in the poem, denouncing them, and expressing her regret at having translated the poem in the first place. It is the vehement nature of the denunciation and the self-disavowal that strikes the reader. The long and short of this is that her manuscript has thankfully survived. David Hopkins explains this retraction as follows: “[...] by the 1670s Lucretian Epicureanism had become associated with the (to Hutchinson, repellent) libertinism of the Restoration court, and it seems likely that Hutchinson’s remarkable pioneering engagement with Lucretius, the product of a tradition of learned Puritan humanism, had originally been more open-minded than her later remarks suggest” (255).7 The letter accompanying the translation expresses, then, in no uncertain terms, Hutchinson’s own ambivalence across time towards the DRN.
25Hutchinson feels obliged to justify her decision to translate the poem. She assures the Earl of Anglesey “[...] that I abhorre all the Atheismes and impieties in it, and translated it only out of youthfull curiositie, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernitious doctrines in it” (1996, 23). Several extracts rehearse, among other things, the causal/casual opposition: “this Lunatick [she is referring to Lucretius], who not able to dive into the true Originall and Cause of Beings and Accidents, admires them who devizd this Casuall, Irrationall dance of Attomes” (24). The translation, if not a labour of love, was one that nonetheless required a deep-rooted engagement. David Norbrook suggests another aspect of its possible motivation:
- 8 For a study of Margaret Cavendish’s own ambivalence towards Epicureanism, see Cottegnies.
Translating the whole of the De rerum natura [...] is an immense task and demands a commitment that would surely be easily sapped by complete hatred of its ideas. And Hutchinson had a particular incentive for tackling Lucretius. The most controversial Lucretius-inspired text of the 1650s, Margaret Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies (1653), was composed by the wife of one of her husband’s main political adversaries. (Hutchinson 2012, xxxiii)8
26If the “burying” of the text, and the recantation in the letter, are one form of disremembering, another is the dismembering of the text itself, one that was to be repeated by both Evelyn and Creech. After the passages “The cause of Sleepe” and “The reason of dreames” towards the end of Book 4, Hutchinson’s translation breaks off at line 1084 with the following note in the margin: “The cause and effects of Love which he makes a kind of dreame but much here was left out for a midwife to translate whose obsceane art it would better become then a nicer pen.” She picks up 120 lines further on. Parts or all of this concluding section were to be left untranslated by both Evelyn and Creech.
- 9 “Never was book so abominably misused by printer, never copy so negligently surveid by one who unde (...)
27John Evelyn’s translation of DRN proved to be an unhappy affair. The first book was published in 1656 along with animadversions. It had suffered at the hands of the printer,9 and Evelyn chose to abandon the project of publishing the remaining five books. He did, however, pursue his translation and, as with Hutchinson, the time lapse between the translation itself and its publication in 2000 has been considerable. In the manuscript that has come down to us, Book 2 is missing entirely for unknown reasons, but Book 4 has suffered a similar fate to Hutchinson’s translation. Again, the offending lines towards the end of the book are missing. Michael M. Repetzki notes in his edition that in Book 4 “he omits the ‘Attack on the Passion of Love,’ which he probably found too lewd” (Evelyn xcvi). Norbrook quotes a letter to Sir Richard Browne, Evelyn’s father-in-law, expressing a prudery which suggests that the lines were seen as too hot to handle: “[...] I had rather much that all the poems in the world should perish, then that anything of mine should contribute & minister to vice” (Hutchinson 2012, lxii).
28Nevertheless, Evelyn’s appreciation of Lucretius differs markedly from that of Hutchinson’s. Though Evelyn’s translation is judged to be far inferior to those of Hutchinson and Creech, there is in the pages “The Interpreter to Him that Reads” (Evelyn 1-12) a more even-handed and open-minded approach to the subject matter which restores the balance between an emotional, instinctive rejection on religious grounds and a more objective, and dispassionate appraisal. At times Evelyn is full of praise, referring to the poem as “this excellent piece” (5), and draws attention to Lucretius’s skills in observation and description. He defends aspects of Epicurean ethics that he sees as advantageous to a moral life, and compatible with Christian principles and teachings.
29The principal event in this chapter of the story of remembering DRN through translation remains Thomas Creech’s (almost) complete translation of the six books, published for the first time in 1682. Creech was at the time a young classical scholar, 23 years old, from Wadham College, Oxford. He must have set about translating the poem about the age of 20. Two editions followed close on its heels in 1683. A fourth edition appeared in 1699 and was augmented in 1700 with Creech’s 1697 translation of Marcus Manilius. Two later editions were published in 1714 and 1722 but, following the suicide of Creech in 1700, an anonymous editor wrought substantial changes and appended copious additions in the commentaries, while filling in the missing verses in Book 4 with Dryden’s lines and, in several places, with his own. The editor in question is believed to be John Digby who had published Epicurus’s Morals in 1712. These later editions contained voluminous footnotes and even short essays, and toned down some of the excesses of Creech’s commentary.
30Creech’s is a fairly free translation, in general a close rendering, what Dryden would have qualified as a “Paraphrase, or Translation with Latitude,” and faithful in spirit, I believe, to the philosophical poem of Lucretius. It is preceded by commendatory poems that sing the praises of the exploit of Englishing the Latin verses among which is one by John Evelyn. The translation was nonetheless, again, marginally incomplete since Creech, as with Hutchinson and Evelyn, docked what he too saw as the scabrous lines towards the end of Book 4 in which Lucretius provides a fascinating and problematic, frank and, one may suppose, in part personal appraisal and description of the nature and pitfalls of the passion of love, sexual intercourse, and related topics.
31Creech chose to omit several passages, lines on bed wetting, lines on love-making in which the poet associates human coupling with that of birds and animals, and a longish passage on the merits and demerits of sexual positions. In the passages in question there is nothing overtly coarse or indulgent. The descriptions are in keeping with Lucretius’s method of observation, insight, and description deployed elsewhere in the poem, though he sees love, at least passionate love, in a strikingly unflattering light, the source of a conflicted and frustrated sexuality, fraught with dangers and pitfalls, a snare to be avoided, and a delusion. The viewpoint is, unsurprisingly, a male one, and the depiction of womankind is, in general, uncomplimentary at best, but it should be noted that the male sex fares no better. It is clearly the subject matter itself, the portrayal of sexuality, that poses a problem for the translators.
32Creech is highly critical of Epicureanism and he chooses, in the preface to the 1682 edition, the policy of misrepresentation and caricature of the Epicurean notion of pleasure:
[...] I have heard that the best Method to overthrow the Epicurean Hypothesis (I mean as it stands opposite to Religion) is to expose a full system of it to the publick view. [...] Ease is the study of the Atheist, Sense is the Reason, and Pleasure the Argument; and whatever thwarts these must seem vain, and ridiculous, as disagreeable to his establisht Criterions. Thus troublesome Providence is deny’d, the notion of a Deity thrown out; to make room for Pleasures, such often as a Beast would disdain to stoop to [...].
- 10 This preface which, as Fleischmann notes, was removed from following editions, did not appear in th (...)
33He evokes “monstrous Opinions (the Fortuitous Concourse of Atoms, the rise of Man out of the ground, like a pumkin &c.) as necessary Consequents to the denyal of Providence.” And yet the poet himself survives this unceremonious dismissal of Epicurean philosophy: “[...] but any man may perceive [...] that he is elegant in his kind; curious and exact in his images, happy in disposition, flowing, even to satiety, in his Instances, of a brisk and ready Witt, pointed in Satyrs, severe in taunts, grave in precepts, and vivacious in discourses, and every way fitted for his bold attempt.” Towards the end of the Preface he evokes the pruning of Book 4: “I have endeavoured faithfully to disclose his meaning, show him whole, and entire, unless in the Fourth Book, where some few Verses are omitted for Reasons obvious enough [...].”10 Creech concludes in a direct address to the reader where he places the onus of judgment squarely on the reader, disclaiming responsibility for the content: “[...] read freely, and censure according to thy knowledge.” Here again, then, the translator feels obliged to distance himself from the text he has translated, and to offer with one hand what he dissociates himself from with the other.
34The poem finds itself sandwiched between this ambivalent preface and the equally ambivalent notes on the six separate books which close the volume. These are, as Thomas Franklin Mayo notes, “practically all controversial, and hostile to the author. The book as a whole represents, therefore, both the most important single contribution to the popularizing of Epicureanism, and the first systematic attempt to refute it” (65).
35A further significant but almost imperceptible form of dismembering takes place in the commendatory verses, which appear from the second edition on. Of those poems the one by Aphra Behn (1640?-1689), “To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius,” the only one penned by a woman, is the longest and most interesting, as it highlights in a spirited manner aspects of the challenge that Lucretius posed for many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers. Behn puts the female condition on the agenda with clear and meticulous irony. Being barred from the benefits of the education available only to (a certain class of) men, she celebrates the fact that the cordon sanitaire of Latin has at last been removed, with the DRN being made accessible in an English translation.
36While others praise Creech’s achievement, Nahum Tate, for instance, does not fail to mention that the philosophy that Lucretius’s poem expounds is a poison. Behn stands out as an exception as she alone enthusiastically acclaims both the message of the philosophy and the poem itself as a revelation. She uses the window of opportunity provided by the translation of this materialist, free-thinking poem, after dutifully acknowledging the weaknesses of her sex, to write pointedly and ironically of the exclusion of women from the sphere of education and knowledge at the time:
’Till now I curst my Sex and Education
And more the scanted Customs of the Nation,
Permitting not the Female Sex to tread
The Mighty Paths of Learned Heroes Dead:
The Godlike Virgil and great Homer’s Muse
Like Divine Mysteries are conceal’d from us;
We are forbid all grateful Theams,
No ravishing Thoughts approach our Ear;
The Fulsome Gingle of the Times
Is all we are allow’d to Understand, or Hear. (25-34)
37Further down, in the Creech editions, she writes, addressing the qualities she sees in the poem as a whole, and the themes of, and tension between, Reason and Faith:
And Reason over all unfetter’d Plays,
Wanton and undisturb’d as Summers Breeze
That gliding murmurs o’re the Trees,
And no hard Notion meets, or stops its way;
It Peirces, Conquers and Compells
As strong as Faiths resistless Oracles,
Faith the Religious Souls content,
Faith the secure Retreat of Routed Argument. (51-58)
- 11 In her edition of Behn’s poetry, Todd suggests that “Behn seems to have provided one version for Cr (...)
38This, however, may itself be an expurgated version, and thus another form of censure and dismembering. So we may surmise following Janet Todd’s lead, given that in Behn’s version of the lines published in her 1684 volume, Poems on Several Occasions the last lines here are altered, much more forthright and critical of religion and religious faith:11
It Peirces, Conquers and Compels,
Beyond poor Feeble Faith’s dull Oracles.
Faith the despairing Souls content,
Faith the Last Shift of Routed Argument.
‘Shift’ is to be understood here in the sense of a devious stratagem. Todd draws attention to this change in direction in her ODNB biography of Aphra Behn:
Creech was eager to neutralize his dangerously unchristian subject matter but Behn saw the poem as a triumphant assertion of rationalism and materialism, a victory of reason over faith. She published this uncompromising view of Lucretius in her own Poems upon Several Occasions (1684) but Creech used a different version of her poem for his volume, in which faith became ‘the secure Retreat of Routed Argument.’ In the same poem Behn praised Creech for rescuing women from the ‘ignorance of the female sex.’
We cannot be sure as to whether this alteration was imposed by Creech, or some sort of compromise agreement was reached between the two writers, but it is fair to assume that the latter version corresponds more closely to Behn’s way of thinking.
39Creech had made the text finally available in English and thus accessible to a much wider audience than the Latin, but he swaddles his infant in at times censorious layers of animadversions, health warnings and commentaries, interspersed with what is often erudite information. The contribution of Thomas Creech to the advancement of Lucretius, despite his expressed antagonism towards the fundamental tenets of Epicureanism, is considerable. In 1695 he published an edition of the Latin text accompanied by voluminous commentary and notes, also in Latin, only the second Latin edition of DRN to be published in England, the first having seen the light of day in 1675.
40It was left to John Dryden to “re-member” and restore the omitted lines and he did so with obvious appreciation and some gusto. He translated the whole of the section on physical love that concludes Book 4 which, along with four other extracts of DRN, were published in Sylvae or The second part of Poetical Miscellanies in 1685 with a substantial preface on translation, in large measure devoted to Virgil and Lucretius. His lines were to be inserted in the 1714 and 1722 Creech editions to fill in the gaps. The 1700 edition even starts with the pages from Dryden’s preface concerning Lucretius which ends with a respectful and appreciative nod to Creech, and the edition then proceeds with the five extracts by Dryden before Creech’s translation.
41Dryden openly addresses the question of the supposed indecency of the concluding passages in Book 4: “The objection arises from the obscenity of the subject; which is aggravated by the too lively and alluring delicacy of the verses” (249). Justifying why he chose to translate the passage in question he employs the metaphor of sickness and cure concerning the erotic impulse and sexual activity, writing that Lucretius “has given the truest and most philosophical account both of the disease and remedy which I ever found in any author, for which reasons I translated him” (249).
42The tone in Dryden’s explanations of his engagement with the poem is at once more detached, playful and insightful as he engages with the burden of the text, and radically other than the positions of Hutchinson, Evelyn, or Creech. Dryden, a well tried and tested poet, translator and critic, was perfectly equipped for the task and his skill is enhanced by his obvious pleasure in translating the chosen passages. In so doing he re-members Lucretius, reactivates, re-voices the chosen passages of the poem, bringing it alive in English in the most accomplished, if partial, translation of the period.
43The final chapter of this relay of transmission of DRN in the period, and the sequent toil of its reception, opens when the baton of the translators passes to the poets themselves. Blackmore, Thomson, Pope, Brooke, Young and Akenside, to name the best known of the philosophical poets of the early decades of the eighteenth century, all, generically and thematically, were influenced in various ways and to a greater or lesser degree by DRN, which had become a pervasive, unavoidable, and at once inspiring and troublesome presence. It is a long and complex chapter which will only be touched on here with reference to another tandem, the best of poetic enemies, Sir Richard Blackmore (1654-1729) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). But how this passage to the genre of the philosophical poem is negotiated is already clearly visible in the didactic epic, Paradise Lost, which remains the other indisputable template for these poets.
44In his article “The Presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost,” Philip Hardie seeks “to develop an analogy between the didactic strategies of Lucretius’s and Milton’s ‘epics of knowledge.’” He continues: “The grounds for this analogy might be located in the shared use of the classical epic tradition by two evangelical poets whose ultimate purpose is protreptic rather than narrative” (13). The hortatory or persuasive discourse is one that aims not only to convince but to convert. To convert to a religion, to explain or vindicate one’s beliefs, or to convert to a way of seeing things and the world order (or disorder), and how best to act in consequence upon that newly-acquired knowledge and perception.
- 12 “One great charm of his work is that it breathes of the open air more than of the library” (Sellar (...)
45For Milton the aim of his Christian epic, memorably, is to “assert Eternal Providence / And justify the ways of God to men” (1.25-26). Hardie underlines, as do other commentators, that Epicureanism while developing an epistemology, and basing its knowledge on observation of the external world of physical nature,12 intends this acquired understanding to be the foundation of an ethics: “Lucretius writes a poem about physics, but the ultimate purpose of an understanding of the nature of the outer, physical world is psychological and moral; true knowledge of the nature of things is the pre-condition for true knowledge of the self” (17).
- 13 James Grantham Turner has recently revisited the question of the presence of Lucretius in Milton’s (...)
46In Book 4, after explaining how echoes function in hills and caves, Lucretius goes on to mock those who believe that these explicable natural phenomena are the proof of sporting nymphs, fauns and satyrs: “for Man, credulous and vain, / Delights to hear strange things, delights to feign” (4.601-602). Like his mentor, Epicurus, Lucretius has no time for such fantastic beings, seeing such belief as rustic superstition. Hardie (15) parallels it with the passage in Book 4 of Paradise Lost beginning “Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth / Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep […]” (4. 677-678). We have Milton’s Christian belief on the one hand, and the Epicurean and Lucretian pre-Christian demystification of the false belief in gods and myths on the other. Hardie speaks of Milton’s appropriation and reworking of this Lucretian passage as an example of “imitation through opposition” (15). This formula can, I believe, be usefully applied to the relationship between DRN and much of the philosophical poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century.13
- 14 See Leranbaum’s excellent Chapter 2, 38-63.
47What Hardie identifies in Milton and Lucretius recalls Miriam Leranbaum’s reading and description of Pope’s Essay on Man as “the reversing of Lucretius” (58).14 Lucretius’s arguments and positions are both contested and rejected, either explicitly and totally, as with Blackmore, or implicitly and partially, as is the case with Pope, but remain present. The two poems can be read as diametrically opposed examples of this imitation-through-opposition strategy. The dismemberment in the sense of outright refutation in Blackmore is systematic and repetitive. In the case of Pope one has the impression that Lucretius is often at the back (or indeed the front) of his mind despite the manifest presence of multiple other sources that have been signaled and discussed by commentators over the years, and that are flagged up in the editions of the Essay by Maynard Mack (1950) and, more recently, by Tom Jones (2016). David B. Morris asserts that “Pope’s primary model for An Essay on Man was undoubtedly Lucretius,” referring to him as “the classical prototype of the philosophical poet” (1984, 156).
48For the philosophical poets the DRN legacy proved, yet again, to be an ambivalent one. In Blackmore’s case no quarter is shown to the designated “atheists” and infidels he has in his crosshairs. Creation, A Philosophical Poem, Demonstrating the Existence and Providence of God. In Seven Books (1712) is a crusading poem which goes to great lengths, literally and metaphorically, to debunk Epicurean philosophy, raising many questions along the way, but throughout Blackmore, conveniently, already has the answers. The world could only have been created by a superior guiding force, the Christian God, and is governed by divine providence. The physical, natural world in its complexity, order and beauty, its “usefulness,” demonstrates clearly that there is a pre-ordained purpose to life, a teleology. This doctrine also underlines the human position, and argues the case for human exceptionalism, i.e. the fact that, in creation, humankind enjoys a privileged role, and has an immortal destiny.
- 15 George Canning translated the unfinished and posthumously published poem written in Latin hexameter (...)
49Blackmore’s is a drawn-out and, at times, fastidious anti-Lucretian diatribe some 30 or so years before the Latin poem Anti-Lucretius of Cardinal de Polignac.15 While affirming and feting God’s wisdom and existence, and citing and celebrating the natural world as evidence, it is a negative poem in the sense that it sets out, above all, to demolish (the word is not too strong) materialist philosophy, as Blackmore understands it. Along with Epicurus and Lucretius, and their atomist precursors, Leucippus and Democritus, Blackmore criticizes or pours scorn on Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Gassendi and Hobbes as well as Lucilio Vanini, Giordano Bruno, and the Pyrrhonians. In fairness, the poem does argue its corner and engages in detail with some of the precepts of Epicurean philosophy, the fear of death, mortalism, the existence of a supreme and guiding Creator, and the existence of the soul as a spiritual and eternal entity. For Mayo the poem constitutes “the most complete anti-Epicurean document of eighteenth-century England” (206).
50Blackmore seeks to combat like with like. He pits poem against poem. His poem, in a sense, would have no reason to exist if the DRN did not itself exist. It is a reaction, a riposte. It is less a celebration of Creation than it is a denunciation of “atheism.” Charles Trawick Harrison describes Blackmore’s motivation and strategy as follows: “The real motive of Blackmore’s undertaking is indicated in his crediting the surviving and renewed influence of Epicureanism to Lucretius’s poetic excellence. One gathers that he means to cast the opposed view into a shape of like attractiveness. To make sure of this, Blackmore simply appropriates the design, the method, and the poetic details of Lucretius” (54).
51This inverted or negative imitation goes so far as, at one point, to transcribe, i.e. to translate, some fifty lines from DRN (5.216-265), lines signaled in the margin by Creech with the note “The World not made by an Intelligent Being,” into his own Book 3 (175-224). Blackmore does not use Creech’s translation so it is presumably his own. Blackmore is clearly unimpressed by Lucretius’s arguments, girds up his poetic loins, and pronounces himself ready and able to give battle:
Thus impotent in Sense, tho’ strong in Rage,
The daring Roman does the Gods engage.
But undismay’d we face th’ Intrepid Foe,
Sustain his Onset, and thus ward the Blow. (3.225-228)
52Blackmore tirelessly apostrophizes and attacks Epicurus and Lucretius in a frontal manner in the course of the poem. Paradoxically, he adopts the imperious tone which Dryden detected in Lucretius: “He [Lucretius] is everywhere confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him” (Dryden 246). This controlling, Lucretian strategy is similarly employed by Pope and is a further example of this at once conflicted and emulatory opposition.
- 16 David B. Morris explicates the argument from design as follows: “the created universe was held to s (...)
53Creation is a defence of the argument from design16 and is, then, in this respect, a protracted Boyle lecture or sermon in heroic couplets. Blackmore ridicules the notion that chance could be the possible force behind creation. The atomistic and casual, materialist philosophy is rejected in lines that characterize both the tone and content of the poem:
Now, who can this surprizing Fact conceive,
Who this Event Fortuitous believe,
That the Brute Earth unguided should embrace
The only Useful, only proper Place,
Of all the Millions in the empty Space?
Could stupid Atoms with impetuous Speed
By diff’rent roads and adverse Ways proceed;
From Regions opposite begin their Flight,
That here they might Rencounter, here Unite?
What Charms could these Terrestrial Vagrants see
In this one Point of all Immensity,
That all th’ enamour’d Troops should thither flow?
Did they its useful Situation know? (1.78-90)
54For Blackmore the world’s “useful” position in the universe can only have been ordained by what he variously calls “a guide divine” (1.211), “a Knowing Mind” (1.311), “a conscious agent” (1.632), and similar epithets present throughout the poem. The word “useful” crops up time and again as though the summum bonum of Creation was its “usefulness.” Man is a benighted creature if he relies on reason alone, and yet everything serves a specific purpose. Nothing exists by chance but has its allotted place in the whole. Blackmore’s own use of reason can appear to be somewhat dodgy:
And since the Rivers and the Floods demand,
For their Descent, a prone and sinking land,
Does not this due Declivity declare
A wise Director’s providential Care? (1.595-598)
55Fascinated as he is by the usefulness of the earth and natural phenomena, he asks: “Of what Important Use to humane Kind, / To what great Ends subservient is the Wind?” (2.697-698). His answer is precise but surprising:
Without this Aid the Ship would ne’er advance
Along the Deep, and o’er the Billow dance,
But lye a lazy and a useless Load,
The Forest’s wasted Spoils, the Lumber of the Flood. (2.745-748)
56Mindful of the development and interests of commercial expansionism, he provides a further answer in Book 3 in the triplet: “Without the Wind the Ship were made in vain, / Advent’rous Merchants could not cross the Main, / Nor sever’d Realms their gainful Trade maintain” (3.435-438). Voltaire was to find a rich source of irony in such arguments of topsy-turvy, cart-before-the-horse logic. He has Pangloss, himself a redoubtable pedagogue well versed in “la métaphysico-théologico-cosmolonigologie,” say that “les choses ne peuvent être autrement: car, tout étant pour une fin, tout est nécessairement pour la meilleure fin. Remarquez bien que les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes; aussi avons-nous des lunettes. Les jambes sont visiblement instituées pour être chaussées, et nous avons des chausses” (207).
57Pope’s assimilation of Lucretius is another story. That DRN has a significant presence in Pope’s Essay on Man (1733-34) has been amply illustrated in studies by Bernard Fabian and Miriam Leranbaum. That said, he never once mentions Lucretius, or Pascal, or Shaftesbury, or Milton, or the many other influences detectible in the poem, apart from the dedicatee, his friend and mentor, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Where he joins up with Blackmore and other writers of philosophical poems of the period is on one essential point, the affirmation of the existence of a providential force, what Pope calls “th’ Eternal Cause” (1.130) and “The Universal Cause” (3.1).
58The Essay is a puzzling poem, a patchwork of sources and ideas, and Pope himself is fully conscious of the challenge of combining poetry and philosophy as is evident in his preface “The Design.” It is a halfway house, at once an essay and a series of epistles. Formally, the essay brings to mind Montaigne, and the epistolary mode, Horace. Montaigne’s Essais are a work in process, a consciousness in movement, always tacking, and open to influences and ideas. Horace is associated with a relaxed, ironic urbane tone. Leranbaum writes, referring to Pope’s never-to-be-completed Magnum Opus, “the ethic system that Pope planned to erect upon the foundation of the Essay on Man” (vii), that “the effect is that of a jigsaw puzzle that has many broken pieces and many pieces lacking” (ix). An Essay on Man itself strikes many readers as a jigsaw puzzle that can never attain a final, satisfactory configuration; it has both too few pieces and too many. Perhaps, as Harry M. Solomon suggests, this open-endedness is part of its attraction: “To acknowledge Pope’s intertextual genius for imitation and allusion, to acknowledge An Essay on Man is a rich set of relations with many other texts, would frustrate critical closure and make absurd the interpretive aim of pronouncing a univocal final judgment” (36).
59There is an uneasy, elusive, but persistent logic throughout, and a clear intention to try and fit the pieces together. The puzzle in question is the nature of human identity, as is clearly (and, thus, unclearly) exposed in the opening passage of Epistle 2, with its final lines borrowed and reformulated from Pascal:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (2.13-18)
60Pope eloquently and economically presents, in perfectly balanced and meticulously fashioned heroic couplets, the turmoil and contradictions that inform the human psyche. In his study of Pope, Morris refers to the fragmented vision, as he reads it in An Essay on Man, as the “disorder of ordinary understanding,” and thus “To read the poem is to work toward a vision elevated and comprehensive enough to recognize the existence of God’s vast, intricate, and harmonious order—not only beyond but within the fragments of a broken world” (1984, 178). Like Lucretius his ambition is to present a world-vision. Unlike Lucretius his philosophy is not an exposition of a philosophical system, but an assemblage, a compound, of what appear to be disparate elements he has at his disposition. Perhaps, as Fred Parker suggests, “Pope himself was not perfectly clear about what he was doing in the Essay” (88-89).
61If the poems of Blackmore and Pope are worlds apart, Solomon unexpectedly but persuasively argues, providing quotes to support his case, that “The resemblances in argument, imagery, and diction between Creation and the Essay are indisputable, significant, and pervasive [...]” (45). Pope has an almost preternaturally perceptive and receptive ear and eye. We cannot know whether what he remembers of his reading is consciously or unconsciously registered, transformed and recycled. That Creation is an anti-model for Pope, whatever the borrowings, echoes or allusions, is patently clear and logical. Pope was not enamoured of Blackmore’s verse. It was all too much, too high-sounding, long-winded, and pompous. In The Dunciad, Variorum (1729) he refers to “Blackmore’s endless line” (1.102), “sonorous Blackmore’s strain” (2.247), and to the poet of Creation as he “Who sings so loudly and who sings so long” (2.256). Pope’s Essay on Man is not a crusading poem either. That Pope was nonetheless an attentive reader of Blackmore’s poetry, as Solomon shows, is no doubt true (43-49). What Solomon overlooks or underplays is the extent to which any echoes and phrases Pope may have adopted are rejigged to serve a radically different purpose. Pope is constantly debunking human pretensions and over-reaching, including poetic over-reaching. Blackmore is, in Pope’s eyes, an epic example of poetic hubris. Pope assimilates, refines, rewrites, and makes his own the materials he comes across in a constant intertextual revision and creation.
- 17 Evoking the elusive status of Pope’s Essay, Parker proposes that emphasis should be placed on how w (...)
62An emblematic passage that illustrates Pope’s “slippery” philosophy,17 and his ambivalent acknowledgement of DRN, appears in Epistle III, in what Leranbaum qualifies as one of the “major instances of [Pope as] ‘Lucretius with a difference’” (54). Pope opens the Epistle in the guise of a lawyer acting for the defence, who, summing up, rests his “philosophical” case: “Here then we rest: “The Universal Cause / “Acts to one end, but acts by various laws” (3.1-2). The be all and end all of his pleading is the notion of an underlying, overseeing causality, a divine providence, the nature of which remains paradoxical and elusive. While this clearly providentialist position is anti-Lucretian, without wishing to suggest that Pope is in this instance a closet materialist and atomist, he goes on to evoke what are clearly Lucretian-Epicurean elements, the attractive force of the atoms joining together to create life forms, and the pattern and dynamic cycle of creation and destruction:
Look round our World; behold the chain of Love
Combining all below and all above.
See plastic Nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form’d and impell’d its neighbour to embrace.
See Matter next, with various life endu’d,
Press to one centre still, the gen’ral Good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
All forms that perish other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath, and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of Matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return. (3.7-20)
63This passage is, then, a blending of Lucretian and Popean elements, and a statement of a broad materialism with its acceptance of life cycles, of a world of unending transformation, of a Popean, non-casual atomism, and the belief in a world order, albeit expressed in vague terms: “the gen’ral Good,” which is somehow dependent on a chain, a motion, a connecting, social principle. Everything is subsumed and joined in a “chain of Love.” Pope thus integrates several Lucretian elements and endorses them after a fashion. He puts into the mix a reactivated chain of being. In the parenthesis of line 18, Pope even appears to be borrowing from himself as the line recalls the opening passage of Epistle 1 with its evocation of the transience of life: “Let us (since Life can little more supply / Than just to look about us, and to die) / Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man” (1.3-5). Sellar refers to Lucretius’s “deep sense of the littleness of human life” (347) which Pope arguably shares here. It is an exemplary passage that shows how Pope adopts and adapts, at once assimilates, and distances himself from, Lucretius. Unlike with Blackmore’s take on Lucretius, there is no hostility, rather the passage and the poem as a whole, despite the differing belief systems, are a token of Pope’s respect.
64DRN serves, arguably, as the template of the philosophical poem, the only poem which sets out explicitly and enthusiastically to expound and defend a philosophy, atomist, materialist, and sensualist. On a different plane, its own physical, material destiny, its discontinuous existence across the centuries can be seen as a metaphor of memory. The very survival of the text, its disappearance, its retrieval, and dissemination constitute an analogy of the workings of memory: its lapses, its blanks, its imperfections, its lacunae, and, at the same time, its fundamental role in the genesis and development of human consciousness and identity.
65In conclusion, De rerum natura unquestionably was and remains a crucial and vital text in the history of Western literature. More than most, if not all, major literary works (is there an equivalent?), it has itself undergone a troubled and precarious journey across time. It has been feted and damned in equal measure. It has spent centuries in limbo. The ambivalent reactions the poem has provoked in the past are testimony to its enduring ability to question, disturb, and subvert. In the period in question here, it provoked an essentially negative emulation and yet inspired and underpinned the development of the philosophical poems of the eighteenth century. The poem could not be ignored but the ideas it expressed could not be openly embraced. Blackmore and Pope illustrate in their respective poems two radically different ways of positioning themselves in relation to this fundamental text. Blackmore proposed one solution: a negative mirror image, a head-on confrontation, a comprehensive dismantling of the ideas of Epicureanism, while at the same time adopting and mirroring the tone and argumentative mode of Lucretius. Pope assimilated and adapted the ideas and images of Lucretian Epicureanism, integrating them in part, and tactfully, into the ethical system he intended to create, his never-to-be-completed Magnum Opus, of which An Essay on Man was to have been a part. If the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a marked revival of interest in Epicurean philosophy and Lucretius’s poem, it can be asked whether any other poem across the centuries has ever exerted such a potent and pervasive influence while, at the same time, being viewed by so many as a bane?
66That said, in no doubt the two most influential and accomplished English philosophical poems of the time, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Pope’s An Essay on Man, the clear and impressive presence and influence of Lucretius is all the more remarkable in that both poems argue against the Epicurean and Lucretian anti-providentialism, and yet proceed by deploying allusions to, and echoes of DRN, but the absence of any overt reference to Lucretius, the silence, can be read as an eloquent testimony of respect, and a mark of the esteem both poets had for De rerum natura as the fountainhead of philosophical poetry.