The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics

Abstract

The focus of Jessie Hock’s book is the impact exerted on early modern French and English poetry by Lucretius’s great Epicurean verse treatise, De rerum natura. What makes Hock’s book stand out is its commitment to reading Lucretius’s poetic afterlife in terms less of the notorious boost he gave materialist thought than of his contribution to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century renewal of poetic forms. For as Hock elegantly demonstrates, scholars, in dwelling on the natural-philosophical content of Lucretian materialism, and thus on the bracing moral and cosmological challenge it put to the traditions of Platonized Christian orthodoxy, overlook how crucial Lucretius was for non- and even anti-Epicurean poets representing a wide range of ethical, social, and political attitudes. Indeed, the key to assessing what De rerum natura meant for early modern letters is to start from the premise that—at least until, in England, Restoration poets like the libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, to whom Hock devotes her trenchant conclusion—most poets who responded to its charms were emphatically not materialists. They were, rather, Christians of an often revanchist kind.Chapters 1 and 2, for example, take up the French Pléiade poets Pierre de Ronsard and Rémy Belleau, notable not only for their verse but also (especially in Ronsard’s case) for their fiercely ultra-Catholic stance during France’s religious civil wars. Similarly, in chapter 4 Hock examines Lucretius’s presence in the work of the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson, who not only translated De rerum natura in her youth but exhibited Lucretius’s influence in her later, pious verse long after condemning her youthful “dalliance” with his atomist doctrines. To be sure, as Hock reports, the two passages in Lucretius that attracted the deepest attention throughout the early modern era were book 1’s invocation of Venus, whose libidinal energy drives the poem even in its most technical and didactic stretches, and book 4’s remarkable analysis of the erotic power of images as attested by the phenomenon of wet dreams, in which adolescent males spontaneously ejaculate under the influence of the airy nothings of sexual fantasy. But though Lucretius himself exploits the power of passages like these to drive home what he takes to be the material foundations of nature, knowledge, and our own characters as sentient and so embodied beings, his early modern successors happily put him to uses entirely their own—and, as often as not, as in Hutchinson, John Donne (chap. 3), or Margaret Cavendish (chap. 5), to uses inimical to the antireligious thrust of Lucretius’s views.The point takes special prominence, for me, in Hock’s discussions of Ronsard and Donne. Ronsard is of course best known for his amours, the collections of love sonnets to Hélène, Marie, and Cassandre that span his poetic career. What, borrowing from the poet and essayist Lisa Robertson, Hock calls the “supple snare” (6) that entangled Ronsard in Lucretian verse was accordingly, at one level, the erotic theme announced in De rerum natura’s introductory invocation of Venus and the self-deluding violence of sexual passion. However, at a deeper level, what Ronsard found in Lucretius was an alternative to Petrarch: a form of verse more firmly grounded in the active experience of love because it paid homage to love’s inhabitance of the living human body. Lucretian atomism and, above all, the Epicurean theory of perception as the intromissive communication of simulacra—the infinitesimally thin films of atoms that objects emit through the air to imprint the visual, aural, or tactile images of those objects on the organs of sense—taught Ronsard the role images play not only as a formal means to poetic ends but as vivid enactments of the way poetry, too, ensnares its readers through the media of image, figure, and voice. As reactionary as Ronsard’s religious and political positions may have been, Lucretius gave him a new, unmistakably modern language that paid tribute to the intimate physicality of frankly sexual desire. For Donne, meanwhile, as also for Hutchinson and Cavendish, De rerum natura supplied a reservoir of conceits that enabled him to craft novel literary experiences in such a way as to thread the needle between Lucretius’s reductive yet inescapably seductive materialist account of human thought and feeling and Donne’s own ongoing idealist commitment to human spirituality. Though Hock does not mention it, Lucretian atomism works in tandem with the religious as well as erogeno-poetic lessons Donne drew from what one of his most famous love poems calls “love’s alchemy.” Lucretius’s simulacra in particular thus modeled how, in the alembic of faith as well as sex, matter sublimates to form the stuff of purified spirit it seems to eliminate.The Erotics of Materialism, accordingly, makes an original and important contribution to our understanding both of early modern European poetry and of its place in the broader assimilation of the materialist insights De rerum natura inspired.