The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics by Jessie Hock

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics by Jessie Hock Robert J. Hudson Jessie Hock, The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, 234 pp. In the face of the common assumption that Neoplatonist idealism constituted the de facto ideological framework behind the early modern lyric, with The Erotics of Materialism, Jessie Hock adeptly recasts Lucretian thought as a persuasive foundational system in the development of the era's poetics. Tracing the reception of De rerum natura from Pierre de Ronsard and the Pléiade in [End Page 180] late-Valois France to Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish and the culture wars of interregnum England, Hock establishes a poetic lineage of Lucretian influence. With John Donne bridging the gap between national/linguistic traditions and the century's worth of poets she examines, Hock enables the reader, in light of the politics of the age, to reconsider Renaissance Petrarchism in terms of Lucretian simulacra and fantasy, then witness the atomist, female-led epistemological alternative to scientific inquiry, where fancy and the imagination are proffered over rational empiricism. Admittedly concerned with matters beyond the lyric, Hock still focuses primarily on close readings of canonical poets to demonstrate how Lucretius informed early modern poetics. One most notable and welcome extra-lyrical element she includes is the publication and popular reception history of Lucretius. Indeed, Hock's study opens with three provocative accounts—the drowning and suicide of two early modern Lucretius editors and Saint Jerome's sensational, apocryphal version of Lucretius's own lovesick suicide—which coalesce to present De rerum natura as a dangerous and scandalous text. Premodern Europe was ill-prepared to accept the perceived impious materialism and hedonistic atheism of Lucretius's brand of Epicurean thought, which led to humanistic anxiety and seduction surrounding the pagan poet. Thus, to frame her study, Hock borrows Lisa Robertson's articulation of Lucretian verse being a "supple snare," one that drew poets near and engaged their pens with its erotic flights. Seduction, after all, was at the heart of the design of De rerum natura, whose wormwood philosophy needed the honey-rimmed delivery method of poetry to entice and mystify readers. Still, far more than merely philosophy's handmaiden or an unwanted nuisance in Plato's ideal republic, poetry is as much a sweetening agent as it is a contiguous part of Lucretian thought. Perhaps ostensibly lured by Lucretius's wanton reputation, all the poets Hock explores ultimately subscribe to his materialist enterprise as a heuristic for their own poetics. In her five individual chapters on Ronsard, Rémy Belleau, Donne, Hutchinson and Cavendish, Hock emphasizes three primary passages from De rerum natura—namely, the incipit hymn to Venus, the honey/wormwood analogy and especially the end of Book 4, where the poet-philosopher expounds on passionate love—as these excerpts succinctly illustrate Lucretian erotics and are often reprised by her chosen poets. Ronsard, first in Hock's genealogy, disruptively introduces a Lucretian paradigm to Pléiade poetics, which seemed—then and now—inseparable from Ficinian Neoplatonism. Examining "Les petitz corps" from the 1552 Amours, Hock demonstrates the conflation of the [End Page 181] Lucretian and Petrarchan poetic idioms and how amorous simulacra is more germane to Petrarchan lyricism than is traditional idealism to account for both the poetic absence and sexual dissatisfaction in Ronsard. Likewise identifying dialogue between Lucretius's hymn to Venus and Ronsard's "Hynne de l'Autonne," Hock answers the longstanding frustrations of Simone Fraisse and responds to the excellent work of Philip Ford, decisively fleshing out examples of the Pléiade's engagement with Lucretius. Lest one assume Ronsard a Lucretian outlier in the imagined group of Parisian poets for whom he served as chef de file, Hock confirms that Marc-Antoine Muret knew De rerum natura well, recognizing its interplay in Ronsard's verse. In fact, her subsequent chapter shifts to the later Ronsard of the Sonnets pour Hélène (1578) alongside fellow Pléiade poet Belleau and his 1576 Pierres précieuses in order to demonstrate the former's multi-decade commitment to Lucretius and the attentive reading of De rerum natura of the latter...