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...

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