‘Poet Laureate of Atoms’

Lucretius: The Nature of Things
translated by A. E. Stallings

Penguin, 336 pp., $15

Why bother, in 2009, with Lucretius, the Roman poet-philosopher?

Never a better time than now, in this bicentennial year of Charles Darwin, whose notions of the survival of the fittest were eloquently anticipated by Lucretius in his first century B.C. masterpiece, The Nature of Things. The poem, though it is much else besides, is a kind of scientific treatise in verse which seeks to explain the universe in strictly materialist terms. This involves a gripping and zealous account of human evolution, which makes reading Lucretius against Darwin richly illuminating.

Darwin himself disavowed having read Lucretius–imagine Milton claiming never to have read Genesis–but he did know there was a Lucretian thread in his family history. As early as the late 18th century his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was elaborating proto-evolutionary theories in the form of epic-length poems echoing the style and substance of The Nature of Things. So Charles Darwin both inherited and extended a major portion of the Lucretian heritage, and the great naturalist’s anniversary is a fitting occasion for readers to return to Lucretius himself.

And we can look forward to another Lucretian moment this year, provided the custodians of the Hadron Collider manage to work out the glitches in that prodigious engine which last year briefly drew the world’s attention down to the scale of atoms. For Lucretius is the poet laureate of atoms. The secret of the universe–he is charmingly gushy about this–is that everything is constructed of atoms (and the open spaces between them), and the infinite variety of the universe can be put down to the endless combinations and recombinations of those indivisible particles.

In a vivid passage he likens colliding atoms to warriors “in everlasting struggle, battling in troops, / ceaselessly separating and regathering in groups.” Homer’s epic warriors are reimagined into the sphere of atomic collision, as if Achilles and Hector were poor ephemeral echoes of those eternal, cosmic jousters. Modern and ancient atomic theory are far from identical or even continuous, but Isaac Newton in his scientific papers quoted Lucretius, and Albert Einstein wrote with guarded admiration of the Roman poet’s scientific foresight. In any case, when they throw the switch in Geneva, and if the atoms collide without bringing an end to life on earth, you could do far worse than to celebrate your reprieve from annihilation by turning to Lucretius’ passages on atoms.

Evolution, atomic theory–none of this may sound like the stuff of gripping poetry. But in Lucretius’ hands the topics are compelling. Partly it’s to do with the charisma of his voice: He addresses you with the rhythmic evangelical ardor of a sermon, as aurally intricate as John Donne and as fervent as Jonathan Edwards, but in the service of a vision which, in its cosmic sweep, comes closer to William Blake, who saw the universe in a grain of sand.

But Blake repudiated Lucretius, because the Roman poet’s gospel is that, since the universe can be explained in materialist terms, we mortals should cease to worry about divine rewards and retribution and cultivate, instead, the supreme mental tranquility–ataraxia–advocated by his hero, the philosopher Epicurus. And he wants to convert you to Epicureanism.

Yet the poem rarely lapses into the aridity of a science textbook or the pestering of a missionary tract, because it is everywhere enlivened by illustrations and asides which touch on all dimensions of everyday life: the way children spin about to make themselves dizzy, the ambiguity of the colors on a pigeon’s neck, the split-second of hesitation when the gates open at the beginning of a horse race. Along with those homely observations there are passages of awful majesty.

The poem opens with one: a sublime invocation of Venus as embodying the generative energy that brings life in all its teeming variety into being. Later comes a description of a thunderstorm as menacing as the one that blows through King Lear. The poem ends with an unforgettable account of a plague that harrows Athens. Lucretius spells out the pathology of the disease–the burning eyes, the oozing sores–with forensic detail.

This is ostensibly meant to illustrate his notions about the material (rather than supernatural) causes of disease; but the account of man’s helplessness before the advancing plague achieves something more, underscoring the poem’s larger cosmic vision of nature’s indifference to man. The English poet C. H. Sisson got it right, locating the power of The Nature of Things not in the Epicurean theory the poet uses as scaffolding, but in Lucretius’ “vision of something more terrible than the theory.”

Lucretius suits, too, the cultural moment which has given us a recent spate of bestselling atheist tracts: The Nature of Things deserves a place among the bookstore ziggurats of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great. This is because Lucretius, if he is not strictly an atheist, burns with Epicurean zeal to persuade us that gods do not fuss with mortals, and so we humans can cast off the shackles of religious superstition.

So Lucretius has been a hot potato in the Christian West, championed by atheists, deplored by the pious, and variously troubling and stimulating to those who fall somewhere in between. Among Christians he has found many admirers: Milton and Alexander Pope drew on his poetic energies while correcting his heresies; C. S. Lewis found The Nature of Things as rewarding a poem after his conversion to Christianity as it had been for him as a young atheist.

Believers such as myself, who must reject Lucretius’ doctrine of divine indifference, can nevertheless admire the force of his poetry; but I would think even unbelievers would pass with relief from the shrillness and reductivism of the professional atheists to the more sublime, more humane, Lucretius.

Lucretius is, then, at this moment not only timeless but also topical. So the appearance of two new Lucretian books is propitious. The first of these, The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, though it is the work of 20 leading scholars and will be consulted by professional classicists, nevertheless is perfectly accessible to the layman and could serve as a field guide to the general reader seeking to explore Lucretius. In their introduction, the editors Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie offer perhaps the best brief orientation to the subject to be had anywhere. From there the enquiring reader can pass on to any of the first six chapters, focusing on the poem itself, and which together form a superb vade mecum to the poetry.

But what makes The Cambridge Companion especially attractive to the general reader is the attention it devotes, in the following 13 essays, to Lucretius’ fascinating afterlife in Western literature, science, philosophy, and art. To read them in succession is like being treated to an Intellectual History of Everything, since few writers have had so many points of contact as Lucretius with so many thinkers in so many fields.

In a standout chapter, historians of science Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson trace the impact of Lucretius on Western scientific thought from the Middle Ages to the present. There is intrigue in discovering how scientists and philosophers in a Christian culture managed this tricky project: to “detach the science of atomism from its atheistic and hedonistic associations,” or, as one 17th-century thinker put it, how to extract the “pure and rich Metall” that could be found in the sinister pagan’s poem.

There’s drama, too, in seeing how Lucretius emerges as a “major driving force in the Scientific Revolution.” Among the virtues of this chapter is that Johnson and Wilson, for all the evidence they present of Lucretius’ impact on science, fend off hyperbole and anachronism by always attending to the differences between ancient and modern materialism, and resist implying false continuity between Lucretius and modern science.

There are stimulating chapters on Lucretius and modern philosophy, including a fascinating account of the role the Roman poet played in the contentious friendship between the radical Voltaire and Frederick the Great of Prussia; on Lucretius’ role in the Italian Renaissance (did he inspire Botticelli’s Primavera?) and on Renaissance English literature, where a special case is made for Edmund Spenser’s indebtedness.

That Lucretius was an especially big hit with Enlightenment rationalists (including notably Denis Diderot, David Hume, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant) will come as no surprise, but many of the details that emerge in tracing their debts to him are vivid and memorable. The famous Lisbon earthquake on All Saints’ Day 1755, which killed so many pious Christians in the churches where they were, at that moment, worshipping, provoked contemporary comparisons with Lucretius’ chilling account of an earthquake which, he argued, points to the absence of divine providence.

Voltaire, who made the Lisbon disaster the setting of a memorable episode in Candide, based his satire in part on Lucretius’ “stinging critique of anthropomorphism” of the kind which leads Pangloss to assume that all things in nature are providently designed for human convenience.

What may come as a surprise is how much Lucretius mattered to the Romantics. His importance for them (argues Martin Priestman in the essay on the poet’s 19th-century reception) has been underestimated. Lucretius lies behind many of William Words- worth’s poems. Schoolboy Percy Shelley was led to atheism in large part through reading Lucretius, “the best of Latin poets,” at Eton.

But Lucretius was an affront to the Christian sensibilities of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Blake’s dismissal of Enlightenment rationalism–“Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau”–concludes with a swipe at “the atoms of Democritus,” which must also count as a swipe at Democritus’ exponent, Lucretius.

Lucretius was a major figure in the Victorian controversies surrounding Darwinism, a topic given its due by more than one author here; what also emerges from the imaginations of Victorian poets such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson is a portrait of Lucretius as a “depressed, tortured modern” on the one hand, and from other writers, such as Edward Fitzgerald and Walter Pater, as a well-adjusted, “right-minded guide to the good life.” Walt Whitman, with some reservation, saw in Lucretius a model for a particularly American kind of poet who would embrace “whatever science indicates.”

The very confirmation of atomic theory may have made Lucretius, in some ways, a less vivid presence in the 20th century, but Stuart Gillespie and Donald Mackenzie nevertheless find intriguing links to writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, and Italo Calvino. An apprehension of Lucretius helps to account for the cosmic chilliness throughout much of Robert Frost, who explicitly acknowledged the poet’s influence. Lucretius is important to philosophers of the 20th century (George Santayana) and the present (Martha Nussbaum). Primo Levi’s scientific career was inspired by Sir William Bragg’s 1925 lectures Concerning the Nature of Things, which included in its opening lecture a “salute to Lucretius.” And on and on. This brief survey of the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius cannot do justice to its copiousness. It’s a book for relishing.

Right, then–your appetite is whetted, and you’re impatient to plunge into the poem itself. Your Latin’s rusty (no longer any shame in that), so which translation do you turn to? The new Penguin Lucretius, translated by A. E. Stallings, offers a rewarding way in. I almost wrote “eccentric way in” because the translator has taken the unlikely strategy (“crazy,” she concedes in her preface) of rendering the poem in rhymed fourteeners, that gangly, sprawling meter rarely seen since the 16th century, and rarely even then. A snippet–Lucretius on the vanity of prayer–gives you the flavor:

Or when a tempest rises up, when winds of gale-force sweep
The seas, take the commander and his fleet out of the deep
With all his mighty legions and his elephants of war–
Does he not pray to the gods for peace, and terrified, implore
The squall to die down, and beseech more favorable winds to blow,
But all in vain, since often violent whirlwinds won’t let go. .  .  .

Once you surrender to it, the jaunty sweep of the meter and the anticipation of the rhymes can carry you along pleasingly most of the time, and remind you what is sometimes forgotten: that for all its burden to preach Epicurean doctrine, Lucretius’ masterpiece really is a poem. That’s a welcome departure from most recent translations of Lucretius which, like the previous Penguin edition, are done in workmanlike prose, or like the widely used 1964 version of Rolfe Humphries, are rendered into loose pentameters hardly distinguishable from prose.

The translator herself is one of the best young American poets, whose first two volumes of verse, Archaic Smile (1999) and Hapax (2006), are among the most accomplished and–what is rare in poetry these days–entertaining books of the last decade. They stand out for their imaginative handling of rhyme and meter and what you might call a sly intellectual whimsy, by which even Stallings’s darker poems glow with a shrewd wit.

I mention Stallings’s original poetry because its qualities can be felt in her translation and help to account for the unconventional character of her Lucretius. This involves an intriguing gap between the rhetorical pitch of author and translator. Lucretius in Latin is a craggy affair: His language is rugged, his phrasing abrupt, his tone lofty and often scornful. “Sublime frenzy” is how an ancient admirer put it. Stallings’s Lucretius is also energetic, but on a different tonal wavelength: smoother, more genial, wittier, just as in her own poetry Stallings is smoother, more genial, wittier.

At its extreme, the result is twee (bones are made of itsy-bitsy bones, and what composes / Flesh is teensy globs of flesh) and occasionally diction and aural effects hint at Lucretian asperity: The cark and care of mortal men and all their hounding fears. Most often, though, Stallings steers a middle course. This passage, in which Lucretius famously argues that a spoonful of sugar (poetry) helps the medicine (philosophy) go down, is typical of the pitch of voice through which Stallings’s Lucretius addresses us:

Consider a physician with a child who will not sip
A disgusting dose of wormwood: first, he coats the goblet’s lip
All round with honey’s sweet blond stickiness, that way to lure
Gullible youth to taste it, and to drain the bitter cure
The child’s duped but not cheated–rather, put back in the pink
That’s what I do.

That’s wonderful writing. Its virtues–the lanky chattiness, the offhand colloquial verve, the wit that pervades it all–belong more to Stallings than Lucretius.

Her translation assimilates other voices as well. In its playfulness it is less like Lucretius than Ovid, the irreverent Roman poet whose masterpiece, The Metamorphoses, was itself masterfully translated in the 16th century by Arthur Golding–into rhymed fourteeners. The metrical parallel is very much to the point: Stallings gives us, in its garrulousness and hint of cheekiness, an almost Ovidian Lucretius. (It makes me wonder whether she has detected veins of whimsy in the original which most of us have missed.) Among English poets, the chief analogue is Spenser, who in his Faerie Queene echoed the phrasing of the famous opening lines of The Nature of Things; Stallings, translating the same passage from Lucretius, echoes the (once again) smoother, more leisurely stylings of Spenser. Much of this ventriloquizing comes off as conscious; more than once she dares to use archaisms such as the Elizabethan “vasty.” I understand those moments as knowing winks from a sly author.

All these things make Stallings’s Lucretius a treat. I doubt that Lucretius and Stallings make a temperamental match: She herself describes the inception of her project as “a lark” rather than an urgent inner need to connect across the centuries with a kindred spirit. English readers who want the verse translation which comes closest to Lucretius’ sublime frenzy will have to turn to the still incomparable, though sadly incomplete, version by John Dryden. Those who want a stricter account of Lucretius’ argument, the mere semantic content, will do better to consult a sober prose translation.

But Stallings’s version, for its freshness, its allusive resonance, its quirkiness, and its headlong metrical momentum, is a welcome addition to the Lucretian tradition. Readers seeking Lucretius in English should not end with Stallings, but they can very happily begin there.

John Talbot teaches English and Classics at Brigham Young.