Lucretius and The Radical Imagination: John Wilmot and The Nature of Things

In The Swerve, Stephan Greenblatt details the journey that awakened Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) after centuries of slumber. Written roughly fifty years prior to the birth of Christ, Lucretius’s epic-length poem offers a stunningly modern vision of the universe and our place in it, yet until a copy surviving in a German monastery was found by intrepid book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in the winter of 1417, Lucretius’s poem had vanished. Celebrating the philosophy of Epicurus, The Nature of Things depicts a universe composed of matter and void infinitely creating and recreating itself and presents the cosmos as the result of collisions and combinations of atoms with no help from an intelligent Designer. The lessons, Epicurus suggested, are that death is final, our actions could can neither please nor displease any possible higher powers, and the key to living a good life is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. These lessons should sound familiar. Indeed, Greenblatt posits Lucretius’s The Nature of Things as a defining text for Renaissance Humanism, influencing Botticelli, da Vinci, Galileo, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.

To Greenblatt, Pogio’s discovery of Lucretius’s lost masterpiece “is something one is tempted to call a miracle. But the author of the poem in question did not believe in miracles. He thought that nothing could violate the laws of nature. He posited instead what he called a ‘swerve’—Lucretius’s principal word for it was clinamen—an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter” (7). Poggio’s rediscovery is one swerve, as is the fact that it occurs fortuitously close to the invention of movable type, for the printing press makes this rediscovered text available to masses of readers—provided, of course, that they could read Latin. In England, the complete text of The Nature of Things was translated by Thomas Creech in 1682, but other attempts to bring Lucretius into English had begun in the 1650s and continued until Creech published his translation. The diarist John Evelyn and the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson both tried their pens, but no poet of the age found Lucretius more fascinating than did John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester took Lucretius’s epicurean notion that one should live for pleasure a tad too far, however, dying of complications of venereal disease and drink at the age of thirty-three. He translated two passages from Lucretius and worked Lucretius’s ideas into his most famous work, A Satyr against Reason and Mankind. Although Rochester never published his snippets of Lucretius, he shared them with others in his circle and thus influenced future generations of English writers, and his ironic allusion to The Nature of Things in his most famous satire shows that he expected some of his readers to be familiar with Lucretius’s work.

One of Rochester’s acquaintances, the diarist John Evelyn, published An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura: Interpreted and Made English Verse in 1656, and the Puritan Poet Lucy Hutchinson shortly thereafter produced a nearly complete translation in manuscript that remained unpublished until 1996. Evelyn’s “interpretation” of Lucretius’s first book contains extensive commentary attempting to make Lucretius’s text less atheistic; Evelyn believed “Lucretius was [not] so much an atheist as many would make him” (li). He notes in his introduction to the reader that for every atheistic principal stated in Lucretius’s text, there are hundreds of counter examples, and he invites his readers to view The Nature of Things in the tradition of 17th-century Humanism: the works of the ancients have much to offer us, and we need only to adjust our visions such that we overlook the irreligious parts. But despite the fact that Evelyn translated Books Three, Four, Five and Six, he never published them, abandoning his project by 1658. Evelyn’s translation was familiar to Lucy Hutchinson, for she notes that “a masculine Witt hath thought it worth printing his head in a lawrell crone for the version of one of these books” (5). Yet after her extensive labor in translating most...