Losing Homer

In 2011 Harvard Professor of English and noted historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt published The Swerve. In this fascinating, if somewhat derivative work, Greenblatt chronicles how the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini rescued the De Rerum Natura or On the Nature of Things by Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-55 BC). In The Swerve, Greenblatt argues that the reintroduction of Lucretius to the West helped to inspire the secular strains of Enlightenment thought. While Greenblatt’s thesis is not entirely correct (Lucretius’s philosophy of Epicureanism was known during the Middle Ages), it does point to how influential one book (in this case, one poem) can be in the formation of centuries of culture.