The Finch and Pea

We’re bringing the Sunday Poem out of hiatus and will hopefully, with some publisher cooperation, feature some remarkable poetry by contemporary poets who work with science metaphors.

However, before we return to present day poetry, let’s go back two thousand years and tackle the greatest of all science poems: Lucretius’ The Nature of Things.

Why should you read Lucretius? His poem is one of the great works of classical Latin poetry, one which influenced many subsequent Roman poets, notably Virgil. It has the added benefit of laying out Lucretius’ remarkable thinking about the invisible workings of nature. Reading this poem, you inhabit the ancient mind of a sharp observer who was trying to make sense of the macroscopic world by theorizing about motions of the microscopic one.

Lucretius was conscious of the requirements of good science writing. He was explicitly an advocate of the Mary Poppins method of helping the medicine go down with a spoon full of sugar. Lucretius packed his poem with illuminating metaphors and, like Darwin, was capable of making striking observations of everyday phenomena that most of us would take for granted. He used these observations to make inferences about the world we can’t see. As an advocate of the teachings of Epicurus, Lurcetius connects his observations and inferences to crucial ideas about how we should live our lives and think about ourselves.

The Classical scholar Richard Jenkyns makes this argument for reading Lucretius:

Of all the great poems of Europe – and it is indeed among the greatest – Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) is perhaps the most improbable. Here is a poem without people in it, without any story; instead it offers a treatise on science and philosophy. The philosophy, moreover, is a strict materialism, which denies the existence of anything magical, mysterious, or transcendent. It does not sound like promising matter for poetry at all, let alone for a work of more than 7,000 line. Yet the result is a masterpiece. A key to appreciating this most unlikely success is to understand the nature of Lucretius’ beliefs and the circumstances in which he decided to expound them.

– Introduction to the 2007 Penguin edition, vii

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Why You Should Read Lucretius”