5/22/2023 0 Comments The swerve greenblatt![]() ![]() What is On the Nature of Things? We know next to nothing about its author, Lucretius, and practically all we have of him is On the Nature of Things, which was written probably around the time Julius Caesar was running around Gaul. “A bureaucrat goes into a library one day and pulls a poem off a shelf, and it changes the world.” “The story itself is so remarkable, and it’s so strange it hasn’t been-as far as I know, hasn’t really been-taken in,” he said. The least we could do is read the poem.Īs Greenblatt sees it, the least he could do was to tell the story. If not for the efforts of a stumpy, rather obsessive Italian book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini, a convincing case could be made that the Renaissance and modernity might never have dawned. The epic very nearly disappeared forever. In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt makes the impassioned plea to read On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius, not by singing its merits but by telling us the story of its rediscovery. ![]() ![]() But literary criticism at its best-as practiced by, for example, Greenblatt-can remind us that what really matters is the love of reading. The public views literary criticism as it does an uncle who works in insurance-old, mirthless, long-winded, and pats you on your head too often. ![]() Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new offering is a love letter to books. ![]()
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